Tom à la ferme

I've recently seen "Tom à la ferme", and it's safe to say that Xavier Dolan is one of the most important directors alive today. With just 25 years, he has proved to have the maturity and intelligence to make amazing films, which are not only magical in their visual aspect, but in the depth of their screenplays as well.

Having said this, "Tom á la ferme" is no exception. Great movie, wonderful to see, and a very interesting story which is, as always, about love. However, every time Dolan shows us his vision of love, he does it in a very different way. This time is about a lost love, and the submissive aspect of it. Brilliant performances as always, all taking place in a very gloomy farm, the authorial work of Xavier Dolan just keeps getting better, so my advice: let's pay attention to this wonderful filmmaker.

This film succeeds in pulling off what "Stranger By The Lake" totally failed to do. The darkness draws you in and intrigues us, and the characters are brilliantly acted and engaging.

Some of the editing is slightly strange, or perhaps the narrative would be a better way to describe it, i.e. there are a couple of transitions between scenes where I found I was having to piece things together arbitrarily, in my opinion, meaning I had to concentrate hard. However I'd much rather this than everything being spelled out in children's building blocks as is the way with many American films.

This is one of the few "gay" films I've seen that had hardly anything superficial and stereotypical about it, and wasn't depressing to watch as a gay man.

Hats off to the guy who played the crazy brother: dark and scary, but the homoerotic tones and suppressed desires sound through his silence, creating a fascinating villain, again, something which the aforementioned other French-language gay thriller completely failed to do, managing only to be faintly embarrassing and ridiculous.

A tense, beautifully shot & directed homo-erotic psychosexual thriller - Tom At The Farm is both intensely gripping, unnerving & disturbing - unlike anything Xavier Dolan had done before (or since) throughout his filmography... Utterly unique in comparison to the rest - the venture in to such unfamiliar territory resulted in a surprisingly effective & impressive movie well worth a watch from audiences who've previously admired his other work.

A young gay man from Montreal travels to rural Quebec to visit the family of his recently deceased partner and attend the funeral. The visit turns into a nightmare. The film is based on the play by Michel-Marc Bouchard who co-wrote the screenplay with director Xavier Dolan. Dolan also plays the main role.

Dolan uses powerful techniques to stir emotion in this bizarre thriller. He also gets great performances from the actors including himself.

The trouble is in trying to understand and empathize with the main character, Tom. He seems to have little or no survival instincts to take care of himself, sometimes even deliberately walking into further trouble.

This is made clear, maybe intentionally, in the second half of the film when Sarah, a friend from Montreal, enters the scene. Sarah at least shows the survival instincts clearly lacking in Tom. There are some hints as to why Tom stays in the dreadful situation but the inconsistencies in his actions cause too much confusion.

Dolan is a powerful artist with much promise at his young age. This was shown in "I Killed My Mother" and "Heartbeats". "Tom at the Farm" has potential but doesn't quite meet the level of the other two films. - dbamateurcritic.

Set in a lonely farm in Quebec, TOM A LA FERME concerns the inner life of the eponymous central character (Xavier Dolan) mourning the death of his lover. He goes to his lover's family's isolated farm for the funeral, and there encounters the mother (Lise Roy) and her other son (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), neither of whom were aware of the dead lover's sexuality.

The film concentrates on the gradual discovery by the family of their dead son's secret, and how it affects them. Francis is both horrified yet strangely affected; as the action unfolds, he develops an unnatural affection for Tom that is both sadistic and sexual. The mother seems to be unaware of what's happening around her, but perhaps she is just deliberately blinding herself to the truth as a means of self-protection. Tom finds himself imprisoned at the farm; even when his close acquaintance Sarah (Evelyne Brochu) comes to visit, he cannot contrive an effective escape.

TOM A LA FERME concentrates on the ways in which people conceal their private inclinations, even from their nearest and dearest, and the damage that actually causes them. This is especially true of Francis, who emerges from the film as a seriously disturbed character, masking his sexual inadequacies beneath a veil of strength. Yet the process of self-discovery for all the characters is an enabling one - so much so that when Tom finally escapes from the farm, he does not appear very happy to have done so. The film ends with a shot of him re-entering the city of Montreal, the lighted skyscrapers flashing by outside his car windows, with his face set in an expressionless gaze as he drives. It seems that 'freedom' for him is nothing more than a form of imprisonment; by extension, therefore, his imprisonment at the farm was an opportunity to discover some form of freedom.

Filmed on a series of bleak winter days in stark, washed-out colors, TOM A LA FERME is a searing psychological examination of sexualities and how they are often willfully concealed.