An Unfortunate Kinship

J'ai Tué Ma Mère (Xavier Dolan, 2009)
*** (A Must-See)


J'ai Tué Ma Mère is the first feature of actor-writer-director-coproducer Xavier Dolan-Tadros who completed the project at the age of nineteen years old. This is a thinly veiled autobiographic film where French-speaking Xavier Dolan plays Hubert, an on-screen alter ego, who is a queer Montréal high school adolescent who gets sent off to a boarding school without his consensus.

The conflict in the film arises between Hubert and his Quebecois mother Chantal (Anne Dorval, who looks surprisingly like Shirley MacLaine) and what makes the story so moving is Hubert’s incapability to understand that no matter how badly his mother treats him that it is done out of unconditional love. No matter how tacky is her dress or how safari is her taste or how bland is her cooking. Chantal is irritated by Hubert’s dependency and rejection and easily looses her temper. Her husband left both of them at young age. What increases Hubert’s sense of dismay towards his mother is his jealousy towards his boyfriend Antonin mom who leads an exciting life with young lovers, take-out, and who commissions Hubert to paint her office. What is so contradictory of Hubert’s, and Dolan’s, matricidal urges is that he uses these intense emotions as a source of creativity. In the film, one of his painting’s is entitled “The Son”, interlaced throughout the film are his b/w personal monologues of his yearning to communicate about his love/hate relationship with his mother, and he also writes a story named J'ai Tué Ma Mère.

The closest relationship Hubert seems to have is with his schoolteacher Julie. For a classroom assignment he lies to her stating that his mother is dead and later she picks him up after his mother chases him at school, and later he chooses to stay with her when he runs away. Julie and Hubert similarly have had poor relationships with their parents and they had close relationships with their grandparents. As well they both express a pervading wanderlust. Julie’s comforting of Hubert epitomizes the tenderness of their platonic friendship.


J'ai Tué Ma Mère is similar to Francois Truffaut’s directorial debut Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959) - a film that Xavier included in his personal top ten film list - which is the story of a child Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and his matriarchal issues who decides to run away from the detainee center he is put into and the film ends with a freeze-frame of him on a beach. Xavier transcends any similarities as the films concluding return to his childhood beach house seems fresh and unpredictable. It is also part of the Quebecois tradition of returning to nature and to rural traditions - like Gilles Carles’s La Vraie Nature de Bernadette (1972). J'ai Tué Ma Mère mixes between the lowbrow and highbrow with references to Jean Cocteau, Marquis de Sade, Jackson Pollack, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Some criticisms of J’ai Tué Ma Mère include the narrowness of its scope, as it is limited to individuals’ feelings that are void of politics and social realities. There are only slight suggestions of poverty, as outside a Blockbuster are two homeless men rifling amongst the trash – for creative representations of the Montreal socially assisted poor see the work of Donigan Cumming - and homophobia as Hubert once gets beaten. Dolan grew up as a child actor, had been in TV series, commercials, acted in Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008) and has just completed Les Amours Imaginaire (2010). The world of the actor-director tends to verge on sublime narcissism as the surroundings are seen negatively and it is the protagonist who is the victim. Dolan's smarmy wink’s to the audience eventually gets annoying as he implies his own cleverness in the ways in which he looks at his mother with self-evident disgust and insults her for the most superficial reasons, like the way she eats a bagel and then has cream cheese stuck on the corner of her mouth.

Mark Peranson’s editor’s note in CinemaScope issue 39 writes “Québec’s wunderkind Dolan whose incredibly overrated Quinzaine debut strikes me as a case of mass hysteria” and later in the same magazine Jason Anderson contradictorily writes “should there be more who are as bold and brazen as Dolan”, Atom Egoyan personally expressed admiration for the film, and in the magazine 24 Images Issue 146 Marie-Claude Loiselle writes that Dolan film stands out from his contemporaries because he creates a language of his own that fits his personality, that at times J'ai Tué Ma Mère is border lining disequilibrium, and that hopefully with maturation Dolan films will increase in mastery hopefully without loosing his singularity and to not try to please everyone. Loiselle includes Dolan amongst other contemporary French-Canadian film chroniclers, or the “Nouvelle Vague Québécoise”, that includes Simon Galiero, Denis Côté, Rafaël Ouellet, Robin Aubert, Micheline Lanctôt, Sophie Deraspe, Bernard Émond, Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu.


J'ai Tué Ma Mère is similar to Ryan Arnold’s Skidlove as the two 2009 actor-director first-features both reflect the period and present particular youthful experiences of early adulthood and the conflicts between identity and role confusion, intimacy and isolation. Both features are partly co-produced which enables them to be full-length features of home movies material. As such they represent an expansive personal creative expression that is rarely seen is the privatively financed Canadian film industry. The films are painfully personal recognitions of deep feelings of anger, fear, and melancholy. In Skidlove, Ryan's character reaches out to others whether it is to his girlfriend Jaymee or to his friends, people are framed together. In J'ai Tué Ma Mère there are isolating close-ups always distancing Hubert from others. In both films the protagonist present a form of alternative lifestyles that includes smoking pot and painting. In Skidlove, Ryan is a heterosexual and deals with contemporary relationships once in the working world and his solace come from friends and girlfriend. In J'ai Tué Ma Mère, Hubert is 16 and wants to move out. Hubert has an intense Oedipus complex shown threw a fall orange-maple-leaf dream sequence where Hubert chases his mother who is dressed in a wedding gown. Through a Langian dream analysis, which emphasizes that dreams bring out underdeveloped aspect of the psyche, it reveals that Hubert complex desire to be closer to his mother.

The two films together present a diptych of English and French-speaking Canadian cinema of the 2010s as did the 1964 films by Don Owen's Toronto based Nobody Waved Goodbye, and Montrealer Gilles Groulx’s Le Chat Dans Le Sac did for their period. Stylistically Xavier Dolan is closer to someone like the expressive Arnaud Desplechin while Ryan Arnold seems more like the evovative Takashi Miike, though they present a sensibility that is rooted in a local cultural heritage. Ryan Arnold’s Skidlove has not attained the same successes as J'ai Tué Ma Mère that won three prizes at the Director’s Fortnight at the 2009 Cannes but it is a must-see and Skidlove will be having its Toronto premiere in May 2010 at The Royal Cinema.-David Davidson

(Bytowne Cinema, 324 Rideau Street, 19/03 - 25/03)

Ryan Arnold on Skidlove

Ryan Arnold synopsizes Skidlove as the following:

Skidlove-as in dark, gritty, infested with lies-is about a artist who meets a young woman (Paige) at a party. She quickly becomes his girlfriend in spite of the mystery that surrounds her. How does she make her living? What is she hiding in her bedroom? And why won’t she let anyone in? The love struck painter tries everything in his power to understand what she refuses to acknowledge. This film is an unsettling look at the beginning and the end of an “anti-romance” between two twenty-something hipsters living in Toronto. Through images, some of them graphic bordering on gory, we discover the “secret garden” of Paige’s boss and clients of his small business. With its B-movie aesthetic, fragmented story line and experimentation with the use of natural light, Skidlove paints a grim urban portrait, the sordid flipside of a story that could have been happily-ever-after.

For more information about the film check out the website (http://www.skidlovethemovie.com/) and there the press kit offers director notes which provides interesting insight pertaining to trust in relationships, perverts and style within Skidlove and good quality stills from the film which I have interlaced within this interview.


Since the completion of the Skidlove it has premiered at the Nouveau Cinema Film Festival in Montreal and at the 2009 Whistler Film Festival, where the Borsos Competition Jury awarded Jayme Keith with a Special Jury Prize for her central performance in the film. I wrote a review of the film after seeing it in Montreal, which can be found here, as well Skidlove made it into my ten best film list of 2009.


The following is a question and answer exchange I had with Ryan about his film Skidlove.

David Davidson: What were the neighborhoods and areas you were filming in? I am thinking in particular of the scenes by the train tracks, the park, the downtown streets, and the biking scenes. These shots are all visually captivating: The train tracks had a very discomforting feeling towards them; the dead squirrel lying on them in the beginning of the film is an unsettling use of foreshadowing, the park scene where you confront Jayme Keith remind me of the personal confessionals in the cinema of Andrei Tarkosvky, and the shots of the downtown streets made me feel like I was actually there.


Ryan Arnold: We shot the film in west Toronto proper, specifically Parkdale, Roncesvalles Village, High Park and the Junction. There’s an abundance of tracks throughout this whole corridor. I like train tracks, just hanging out getting drunk on them is a pretty decent party in itself for my tastes, which we do in the film. I don’t find them discomforting myself as most of the time they’re very still, save the obvious example. I would say the discomfort comes from the fact that they can’t just stop on a dime, and quite often they can sneak up on you despite their size and noise when immediately beside you. Maybe that’s what I was thinking. Who knows? They’ve got an ominous presence, are a product of industrial revolution that have persevered and will hopefully continue to do so in the face of modern methods. We’ll continue to invent new ways of travel and shipping (see; general space travel/back to the future films) but the train will never die – at least not for a while I don’t think. At least I hope not. I like to think trains and ocean tankers are two really tight drinking buddies. I can’t wait to shred on an oil tanker.


I’ve never seen a Tarkovsky film, but I’m aware of his work. I’ll have to really take a look at some of his films before I answer that question with the respect it deserves. That being said, I’m flattered and I think the goal was to put the viewer there but still have a slight veneer to it all. I always like to sense some level of whimsicality.

David Davidson: How much of your own experiences did you want to bring to the film? I remember in the film Rennie (played by Ryan Arnold) tells Jayme you are from the other side of the country, and you are from Vancouver right?


Ryan Arnold: I don’t know if one can truly control how much they let out. There is always going to be, and always should be a certain amount of personal heartache involved for a good strong connection with the audience. They need to feel the humanity to ultimately connect. That’s what’s important and that’s what hopefully made its way in. Aside from the moment you mentioned regarding coming from the other side of the country, and some drinking on the tracks, the film is fiction. It is a fiction that I chose to create and ultimately live in briefly, only to return to the dregs of reality. I think that’s all filmmaking is to me. A level of escapism to places that, are not necessarily happier or sadder than my own existence, but rather just more interesting. I don’t think I’ll use filmmaking to vent my anger or frustration with my real life relationships but rather explore things that are far more interesting than my own life. As a viewer of film, I’m not sure what it does for me. Most of the time it just makes me anxious.

David Davidson: The film had a lot to say about relationships and corruption, what are feelings about these issues living in Toronto today?

Ryan Arnold: I don’t believe there can be complete trust or complete honesty in any situation. I do not feel that it is possible to completely trust someone or to be completely honest with anyone but oneself. That doesn’t mean however, that an effort cannot be made, and relationships are in fact opportunities to explore how close you can get to being completely honest and trustworthy with someone you deeply care for. I wanted to trek that ground through this film, along the way revealing how important it is to strive for a mutual understanding of one another because the consequences can be quite devastating. This can be applied to any relationship in any city in the world. No city is more romantic than another. No city is more dangerous than another city – when it comes to relationships and emotions. Warfare in cities is another story, and I don’t feel like talking about warfare right now.

David Davidson: I really liked the extra attention to detail and how you had the paintings in the background to accentuate the story development. That is something I would have liked to have seen more of, something like the ending of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966) where there are many panning close-ups of the medieval Russian icon painters work. It looked like a lot of time and effort went into the paintings, you painted them right? Can you tell me about your experiences with painting?


Ryan Arnold: Again, I know of the film but I have never seen it. Yes, a lot of time does go into painting. Like filmmaking there is no immediacy to it. It is long, drawn out and tedious. As a result, the process is very difficult to capture on film. Thankfully, I knew the style in which I was going to be cutting the film and I was able to jump through the process and show the progression spread over 3 shots or set-ups intercut with the other side of the story. Another effort to put the viewer in there with the character was to have all the paintings done on polyurethane plastic so that we could shoot through it. I think it worked in some cases but I wouldn’t advise working with poly and paint, particularly if you’re a beginner. I enjoyed it but time was of the essence and had the ‘shooting through poly’ not been the desired effect I wouldn’t work with it again. Poor blending, poor adhesion, poor pockets and too much liquor required to deal with it all. Plus everything had to be on a large scale, which just added so much more time on top of it. However, it did pay off and I’m glad I went through it. The images and the sheer size help connect Rennie in his efforts to piece the story together, all the while providing some level of foreshadowing. Interestingly, I had planned on having a load of close-ups of the pieces toward the end of the picture, but we couldn’t get the right light cast across them because of the reflective nature of the poly. It’s nice to know it might have worked though.

David Davidson: How was working so close with the cameraman? It must have been very intimate as many of the shots were very personal and up close.

Ryan Arnold: Chris (DOP) and I fell into a very casual, mutual working relationship. We eased into it over a couple months all the while working on the script. I was horribly lucky to have met Chris, as we both have a very similar sensibility for what we want and how to get it. Furthermore, I knew we weren’t going to shoot conventionally with a structured 30 day shoot. We didn’t have the budget, but more importantly we couldn’t get the light we wanted all day, every day for 30 days straight. As a result, we shot very organically, just chasing the dying light around the west end until it was dark. Chris is great at taking anyone’s ideas, in this case mine, and making them 100 times better, which was very lucky for me again. He did this all in addition to providing a slew of his own ideas. That’s not to say there weren’t arguments between us because there were, but the good times out weighed the bad. Regarding the camera being in close, I’ll have to admit it was never in close at all. The camera was never very close to either model in the frame because we long-lensed the majority of the film to get a more interesting depth of field. We started to devise a way of shooting and communicating over distances, sometimes very great ones to get the look and feel we wanted. It took longer, but it looks so much better.

David Davidson: How was being both the star and director of the film? What role did you like the most?


Ryan Arnold: Quite simply, I much prefer directing to acting, though there can be moments of fulfillment from acting. In this case, it wasn’t always the plan to act, however with the amount of time that would be required of another actor and the budgetary constraints upon us it just made sense to me after a while. I knew I could do it so I did it. I would do it again, but hopefully in a smaller supporting capacity. So far as appearing in other projects conceived by other people, I’d love to try it out and see what happens to get a different perspective. I appeared in Chris’s film that we shot last spring and it was very rewarding.

David Davidson: My friend Matthew Curran who I was with at the movie had a question he wanted me to ask you, so I am going to do it. How long did it take you to grow the beard?

Ryan Arnold: Would that be the first, second or third time I grew the beard?

David Davidson: Thanks again for corresponding. It was great to hear your thoughts on Skidlove.

On Skidlove, Canadian Mumblecore

Skidlove (Ryan Arnold, 2009)
*** (A Must-See)


Skidlove, which is slang for passionate affection between disenfranchised youths, tells the story of a twenty-something painter Ryan Arnold and his attempt to kindle a relationship with the girl, Jaymee Keith, that he likes. The two meet and hook up in a expositional long montage with a daze-like score. They soon start to go out after some initial reluctance from Jayme. Her reluctance springs from her hidden occupation of selling her bottled urine and menstrual blood on the black market. The buyer of her excretions personally inhales in rapture her goods. This is the love triangle.

Ryan, a struggling artist, typically does not have too much money to throw around. His restaurant job with accompanied meager wage and intermittent painting sales awards him his spare luxuries. His dinner consist of Ramen noodles, he drinks Pabst Blue Ribbon, and leads a relatively lackluster life, but he is happy. He lives, works, and sleeps around his studio. This is where he appears to be the most comfortable and open. He discredits photography in its inability to capture experiences and as a corrupting form of recollection. In his paintings either the ones he is working on or if they are just in the background his life experiences, memories, and emotions abstractly arise in them.

Ryan Arnold and director of photography, Chris Clifford, paint a beautiful surface with colorful light and darkness. Scene's that stick out include Ryan walking at night in a purple hued treescape, the dank and gritty Toronto downtown streets look the way that they feel and Ryan gratifyingly and mournfully biking around. While the cinematography around train tracks reminds the viewer of other existential tales such as Vittorio De Sica's Umberto D (1954) and Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot Le Fou (1965). Isolated contemplative close-ups demonstrate the close relationship between actor and the cameraman.

Ryan is charismatic, upbeat and pleasant with his friends and girlfriend. In conversations he comes off as sly and funny. His magnetism when dented with failure brings out even more human qualities as it leads to personal re-evaluations. He represents the 21st century emerging adult. He bikes around the city, walks unfazed down sidewalks, and earnestly busses table at a restaurant.

Jaymee's living is dictated by her output of urine, menstrual blood, and soiled underwear. The monetary gains of such simple, and discusting, demands are an easy way out of having to work. This form of comprise and moral adjustment is a result of her encounters with the black market dealer Roger Bainbridge. He is disgusting, violent, crude, sadism and perversions. He is the source of many gross outs and a painfully needling experience. His leaching onto the already troubled couple is a parable about the negative and corrupting effects of living in a large city. Roger tries to purchase Jaymee ease and affection while Ryan emotionally wins her over through perseverance. What makes up this film is the choices, habits, resiliency embodied by the diffident protagonist.–David Davidson