Matthias & Maxime

Though it doesn't stray too far from Xavier Dolan's usual themes of questions of identity and sexuality, 'Matthias & Maxime' displays growth that comes from the maturity that resulted the movie as one of Dolan's most engaging and modest film in years.

A group of former high school friends gathers at a French-Canadian country retreat to swim, get drunk and hit a few bongs. During the course of the evening Matthias (a lawyer) and Maxime (a bartender) are hoodwinked into locking lips on camera for an "expressionist" film project put together by the amusingly annoying younger sister of one of their group. Reluctantly they comply. The deed done and the weekend over, both return to the routine of their daily lives, but as autumn gives way to the first snow of winter, a chill has descended on their friendship.

What follows is an absorbing character-study of the two men; Matthias representing Order (professional at a city law firm, dating a woman named Sarah, and a stickler for the correct use of grammar) to Maxime's Chaos (single, scruffy and struggling to care for an addict mother.) Friends since childhood, they are presented almost as a long-term couple within the group. As Maxime prepares to leave Montreal for a new life in Australia it is in Matthias that we begin to see signs that something is amiss as his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. So what exactly is at the root of his unease? The kiss is a bit of a McGuffin, the hook which serves to throw light on the bigger issue of Maxime's going away, with clues pointing to its cause and effect.

Director Xavier Dolan (the endearingly shambolic Maxime) explores the relationship between the two protagonists by taking the unusual step of separating them for most of the film, which covers twelve days leading to Max's leaving party, but takes his time to embellish the slight drama with enough symbolism, visual cues and smokescreens to keep things interesting; a change of clothes before filming their smooch sees them switch colours (red to blue and vice versa); Matthias takes a night-time swim and fetches up exhausted on the wrong shore; Max gets drunk and watches as the birthmark spilling like blood from his eye vanishes in the mirror before him. Scenes are framed by windows, lenses, mirrors, hands, giving the sense of peering in on a slowly unfolding mystery. Mundane conversations, on second viewing, are imbued with connotation (note the opening line of dialogue).

This is not, then, a film full of vacuous men sitting around with their shirts off, clinking wine glasses in swimming pools or flailing around in scenes of a softcore nature. There are, instead, some terrific performances from all concerned, intertwined with wry humour, and the dynamics and interplay between the larger group of friends feels genuinely authentic.

If the film falters slightly it's that the ending is, alas, ambiguous (Dolan thinks it's clear where things are headed as the credits roll, but then he wrote it.) There is a cathartic moment between the two men late in proceedings not unlike Emma Thompson's famous snotting scene from Sense and Sensibility (and with a serious amount of added smoulder) but when the final piece of the jigsaw slots into place - during a phone call on Max's final day as he attends to a last-minute detail prior to his departure - the picture remains incomplete.

At its core, the film is a beautifully understated snapshot of two people separately going through the same moment in their lives and the shadow it throws over each of them, as those who know them look on in puzzlement, and holds up a mirror to something we are all sometimes guilty of; hiding our feelings so convincingly that we unwittingly become the architect of our own and others' misery.

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Matthias (Matt) and Maxime (Max) have been best friends since early childhood. While they still share a common group of friends, their life journeys have diverged - Matt is a successful lawyer, while Max is a bartender. Max has guardianship of his mother (Dolan again with mother issues?) and may be trying to get away from her by passing the guardianship to his aunt and going to Australia for 3 years. As the date for Max's leaving nears, Matt's behavior becomes more erratic, though he is unable to properly express his feelings, even though Max offered to delay his departure and have them spend a last weekend together.

The submerged feelings theme reminds me of Happy Together. However, I don't quite buy that 7-year-old feelings for companionship are a precursor to what might be 30-year-old sexual feelings.

The large number of characters is a distraction, as it took energy to try to figure out which were of significance. The many sets / locations also seemed excessive for the story. Dolan may have gotten a bigger budget, but it the film could do with some tightening.

What struck my most about this film was that, just twenty minutes in, I got the feeling that I was watching a totally new kind of film. It's different from anything else. You don't notice it at first though. It follows the same sorts of conventions as other films, but at a certain moment I realized it had a completely unique tone to it which I personally had never seen before.

I don't know if it was deliberate. I don't know if it's something that's existed in other films, but it's certainly something I don't recall having ever seen myself. It almost feels like what some would call realism, but it's not. And since it's not quite that, it ends up being something completely different. It's subtle at first, but it never lets up. The wonderful camerawork only adds to it. Recommend.

As someone who has just finished watching all of Xavier Dolan´s films, I can say this movie has the same three characteristics as all (or most) of his other work: complicated relationships and identity as a theme, an awesome soundtrack, and dialogues where silences and what is left unsaid are just as important as words. This is good or bad, depending on whether you were expecting his work to have evolved after a decade.