Matthias et Maxime

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.

Dysfunctional family issues especially with his mother, repressed feelings for a childhood friend (Max), broken relationships, guilt are the cliched contexts in his last work which can be seen often in his previous films such as Tom at the farm, I killed my mother, Mommy... Quiet predictable script. Rating: 5.5

"For people who become besties, their cherished friendship is always alloyed with a degree of love or affection, and a carnal one is not excluded. There is an old saying "no pure friendship can exist between a man and a woman", which now we shall modify to "no pure friendship can exist between two persons". So thematically, Dolan delves into something more removed from queerness, the consummation of Matthias and Maxime's making out in the utility room, coming lately and first in close-ups and then sublimely peered through a window pane, is less sexual than emotional, it is two best friends saying goodbye to each other, words fail them, but bodies don't lie, a rite of passage towards adulthood."

read my full review on my blog: Cinema Omnivore, thanks.

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.

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.