Netflix: Only a few days left to catch one of Xavier Dolan’s best movies

It was on the advice of his friend and favorite actress, Anne Dorval, that Xavier Dolan discovered Jean-Luc Lagarce’s play, Juste la fin du monde, created in 1990. To bring this work to the screen, the Quebec director surrounds himself with a performance. The crème de la crème of French cinema: Marion Cotillard, Nathalie Bai, Léa Seydoux, Vincent Cassel and Gaspard Ulliel, who died on January 19, 2022.

Presented at the 69th Cannes Film Festival in 2016, the film received the Grand Prize from President George Miller. If the drama seduces France – backed by more than a million in theaters and three Césars – American criticism is a killer, even denying the feature a release in the United States. Dark, disturbing and heartbreaking, Only the World’s End remains one of Xavier Dolan’s least accessible films and yet one of his most thrilling.

After a twelve-year absence, Louis, a successful writer, returns to his family for a week to tell them of his death. His mother, Martine, his sister, Suzanne, and his brother, Antoine, do not suspect anything around him. Only his daughter-in-law, Catherine, seems to have some doubts.

Then begins a long day of waiting, drowning in settling accounts and unconscious frustrations. It is with this plot that the filmmaker portrays the crisis of a family that will be separated once and for all. This paradox is the first in a long list, as the entire film is built around the conflicting attitudes of various characters.

Protect yourself from reality

To talk about the lack of communication, Xavier Dolan offers a film where dialogues are everywhere. Upon returning Louis – great Gaspar Uliel – Spend time individually with each of your loved ones. If the patient remains very silent, his interlocutor is always very talkative and monopolizes every conversation. However, they have nothing to say and talk to each other to fill the void and hide their discomfort.

It is also around the paradox that Martin’s character interprets Natalie Bay, articulates. Too talkative, sometimes shouting, this mother hides energy behind her, and her troubled gaze betrays a deep discomfort in front of this child she no longer knows. All the characters in this story wear a mask to protect themselves from the truth, just like the hero who hides in fear behind a pale face.

The only shred of truth can be read in the eyes of Catherine, which she embodies Marion Cotillard. He is the one who, thanks to his listening skills and observant eyes, manages to partially solve the mystery of his brother.

Xavier Dolan emphasizes this sense of turmoil that permeates the atmosphere of the film with the camera, where he reproduces very close shots of the faces of his characters. There is such a closeness between the actor and the lens that the audience sometimes has trouble breathing and even resting.

However, two sequences, both musical flashbacks, expand the film’s walls. on the first strike Dragostea Dean Tayband from O-Zone and another, on the cover of Francoise Hardy’s title, I miss mixing, sang exotica. Always with the help of his cinematographer Andre Turpin, Javier Dolan creates a film with a dark image that shines only during the finale, the climax of this family reunion.

Many detractors criticize the director for always using the same themes in his films. In fact, he reinvents them in different ways in each film. With The End of the World, Xavier Dolan rediscovers family, the mother figure and its attraction to human conflict in a tough, melancholic feature film that refuses to spare the audience and gives them what they expect: the truth.

It is by no means clear the origin of the disease that afflicts Louis – is it cancer, AIDS? – and the longed-for words will never come out. The disappointment that the audience shares with the characters of this film is as difficult as the man himself.

Xavier Dolan’s Just the End of the World leaves Netflix on January 15th.