It's Only the End of the World is a perfectly hellish shouting match - review
Director: Xavier Dolan. Cast: Gaspard Ulliel, Léa Seydoux, Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel, Nathalie Baye. Running time: 97 mins
Xavier Dolan’s new film is going to drive people spare. It’s what he does. The Québecois prodigy, now six features into his career, has developed a signature of thickly applied brushstrokes, song choices so uncool they’re cool, and an artfulness so desperate to be noticed, it’s as if a kindergarten swot is thrusting acrylic portraits of his classmates at you every few seconds.
It's Only the End of the World is five such portraits at a family reunion, which Dolan has adapted from an old play by the French dramatist (and Aids victim) Jean-Luc Lagarce. It’s a shouting match in extreme close-up: imagine a French-Canadian August: Osage County with the editor bugging out, and cycling only between one head-shot at a time. The experience is frequently infuriating, but it’s quite clearly supposed to be – it’s about hell being the other people in your own family.
Louis (Gaspard Ulliel), the gay youngest brother of the clan, flies in at the start for a long, long-delayed catch-up with its fellow members. He has something grave to tell them, which we easily guess, but finding the moment is tricky: he’s not even arrived before the ear-bashing starts.
His mother (Nathalie Baye) and sister (Léa Seydoux) can’t stop sniping at each other, while older brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel) is an aggressive boor staring mostly out of the window, and a dewy-eyed Marion Cotillard plays the timid sister-in-law Louis has never yet met.
Dolan explains away the dramatically hoary HIV bombshell with a caption saying “somewhere a while ago, already” at the start – but there’s that hipster tone creeping in, which will make this an unlikely film to win him new friends. This vague idea of period also explains the fright-wig styling and heavy make-up of the Baye character, which is pure Almodóvar circa 1988, and makes her mannered turn the hardest to get on board with.
One-on-one confrontations are the meat of the movie, but most of the cast are better reacting in the ensemble scenes than going full monologue. Cotillard’s Catherine seems a haven of compassion – a slightly gormless dormouse – until she tells Louis she’s named one of her sons after him, and drops the clanger that she figured he wouldn’t be having any children himself. She digs her way further into this hole, hung out to dry a little by 21st century hindsight, but it’s watching Seydoux smirkingly relish the exchange that gives it zest. She’s bitterly funny.
Cassel gives an impressively unwelcoming performance, making it obvious that Antoine wants rid of his brother stat – an agenda declared outright when they drive down the shops together for cigarettes, and he savages Louis’s attempts to open up dialogue. This is a crisp Dolan set-piece, sound design intensifying in a dangerous crescendo as Antoine leans his foot on the gas.
The bilious entropy of Louis’s family succeeds in dictating an unconventionally patterned film, however familiar the dysfunction-off might sound on paper. And though Dolan’s predilection for show-offy sequence-building gets the better of him time and again – it’s close to being a score of music videos on a lockstep playlist – the jumpy quality of its structure is entirely meant to refuse smooth build-up.
We might find it petulant and annoying of him, but it’s still the point: momentum keeps stalling, because no one in this ruckus is getting anywhere. There are two glisteningly vivid flashbacks, one to a teenage memory Louis has of sex and drugs with a first boyfriend, the other a reverie about a family picnic.
Dolan’s no Fassbinder, let’s be clear, and makes his dumbest mistake with a dismally trite bit of bird symbolism at the end. Even though he has a palpable vision, he’ll get rotten looks up and down the Croisette for this film.
There’s no emotional release to it, unlike the crowd-pleasing, officially “better” Mommy. The funny thing is, this one’s a more striking failure than that was a success.
