Matthias & Maxime (2019, Xavier Dolan) (Patreon)

54/100

A bit churlish to just reject a movie's premise, perhaps, but it's hard to believe that two people with the hots for each other would maintain platonic equilibrium for their entire adolescence (and well beyond), then freak out when required to kiss for a student film. Granted, Maxime's also about to leave the country for two years, but this entire relationship feels at once ill-defined and overdetermined; we see too little of them prior to the crisis, are denied the kiss itself or its immediate aftermath (a cutesy move—cutting away at that instant clearly signifies an emotional rupture, which the film studiously ignores for a while), and then get clonked on the head with such clichés as "I need you, so I will lash out at you for no reason" and "Let me numb the pain of my closeted existence with an ostentatious display of ostensible heteronormativity, strip club anyone?" Oh, and there's a symbolic dead plant, too, almost forgot about that. Dolan's usual sprawl, however, provides several compelling distractions. The all-male crew with whom M&M hang intermittently creates a French-Canadian Diner vibe, with lengthy arguments about arcane nonsense (I may have identified with Matthias' annoying tendency to correct others' solecisms) delivered rapid-fire in what I suspect is barely translatable slang. Anne Dorval, meanwhile, has now appeared in Dolan's oeuvre three times as "the mother" while somehow being all but unrecognizable from film to film—those three women have nothing in common apart from a used uterus. There's not nearly enough of her, though, and the movie's dorky, flight-adjacent finale makes it retroactively play like a Love, Actually subplot bloated to two hours. Stray joke that will precisely date it for future historians (responding to the student filmmaker's pretentious shot of empty playground equipment): "Are the swings non-binary?"