What Happens When Your Heroes Fall?
It’s 2015. Fourteen-year-old me, based on a Tumblr community recommendation, signs into Kanopy and watches J’ai tué ma Mère. At this point, I’m interested in filmmaking, but in a vague, non-concrete way that manifests in following burgeoning directors on YouTube and getting too up-in-arms about the poor (in my opinion) color grading of Marvel movies. It’s me joining my high school’s Media Arts Program, and making a slightly blind decision to watch the first of indie-darling French Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s films — the first being (for both him and me), J’ai tué ma Mère. Eight years later, it doesn’t feel overdramatic to say that the course of my life changed after seeing this film.
J’ai tué ma Mère (translating to ‘I Killed My Mother’) follows teenager Hubert and his tumultuous relationship with his mother, interspersed with moments of reflection and growth about Hubert’s sexuality, education, and more. Dolan wrote the semi-autobiographical film when he was sixteen, directed it when he was nineteen, and received an eight-minute standing ovation for it when it screened at Cannes (which is still impressive, even for a festival where a five minute applause is now average). At fourteen I didn’t necessarily aspire to create something at this level within the next five years, but it did give me a standard for what I enjoy in film, and it did expose me to filmmaking that went outside traditional conventions. After J’ai tué ma Mère, I fell into a rabbit hole of Dolan’s films. And though I still haven’t seen all of them, over the past eight years, I’ve made my way through Les Amours Imaginaires, Laurence Anyways, Tom à la Ferme, Mommy, and Matthias et Maxime. I’ve endlessly recommended Dolan’s films to other people, repeatedly named him and his work when asked for favorites in film classes, and written an entire essay about his collaboration with his Director of Photography André Turpin for a cinematography class I took in my junior year of college. Since first seeing his work I’ve of course expanded my field of vision and explored more in the world of independent and nontraditional filmmaking (so much so that Dolan seems almost conventional in comparison to some films I’ve seen, now), but I still find myself coming back to his work, and never really letting it go. All this to say: my taste has expanded and is ever-evolving, but I will always cite Xavier Dolan as my favorite director, and as one of my earliest influences. His work showed me what one could achieve through filmmaking; he made me want to make art that impacted others in the same way that his work had first impacted me.
So you can only imagine the genuine devastation I felt when, yesterday, whilst minding my business, I read that Xavier Dolan is quitting filmmaking. While Dolan’s films have always been cult hits, the actual audience for and reception of them has declined in the past few years. Matthias et Maxime did okay (financially - it’s an underdog favorite of mine), but Juste la fin du Monde and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan received conflicting reviews, and The Night Logan Woke Up has struggled to find distribution despite being finished last year. In the interview where he broke the news, Dolan cited feelings of hopelessness about the purpose of art, saying that the world is falling apart and art is useless in the face of this. And even moving past my own philosophical disagreement with this statement, it’s heartbreaking to see a filmmaker whose art has so clearly impacted people, say that it doesn’t make a difference. It’s no secret that it’s harder than ever to make a film. People aren’t going to theatres, studios are making filmmaking nearly impossible to make a living off of, and the large films being made are often feeling soulless and unmistakably revenue-driven. The WGA is still on strike, TV shows get cancelled a month after they air, and films get taken off streamers to avoid paying residuals (that is if they’re even released to begin with). Given the generally hopeless landscape of it all, it makes sense that truly independent, niche filmmakers like Dolan are choosing to step back, despite him being a Cannes favorite for years (with films like Mommy receiving a rare mid-film applause) and despite him forming meaningful and genuine working relationships with filmmakers and actors alike (Anne Dorval, Jessica Chastain, and the aforementioned Turpin to name a few). How did we get here, to a stage of this industry that is so inhospitable to artists that we have one of the beacons of a generation of filmmakers saying he has no desire to make any more films, simply because of the world he’s faced with after he’s done making them?
When we think of the great, currently-living filmmakers, we think of Scorsese and Spielberg and Lucas and Fincher and Lynch and Lee. Expand a bit and maybe you’ll get Tarantino, Linklater, Cameron, Nolan, del Toro, Anderson (Wes), Anderson (Paul Thomas). And moving past the utter homogeneity of that group of people (all men, all straight, and all white, save for Guillermo del Toro and Spike Lee), another uniting factor is age. Not all of them are ancient, of course, but it’s scary to think that Scorsese is still the most outspoken defender of the art of cinema and curators of it as a film historian, when he’s currently eighty years old. Of course there are younger filmmakers making names for themselves, but how are we supposed to usher in a new generation of talent when we’re making it near impossible for genuinely independent artists like Dolan to find a place? How am I, a first-generation Desi American woman, supposed to find footing when Dolan, a now 34-year old white (and, granted, gay) man is giving up?
I want to address all of the facts of this situation, and the facts are, this situation is changing by the hour. When I first started writing this post, all I had to go on was the interview article quoting Dolan. Now, hours later, I have words from the director himself, who took it upon himself to clarify his words in an Instagram post. Dolan says that he’s “at peace with [his] decision,” that he “want[s] to be free” of the confines of other people’s opinions, of the tedious and capitalistic aspects of filmmaking, of press tours and distribution. He says, more precisely, and with a sentiment I do agree with:
Storytelling deserves the best of us and everyone who commits to it. Every detail should be perfect. Every line, reiterated, rewritten, or scrapped. (…) Every actor is a creator, every costume and lense are a choice, every window dressing is a conversation. (…) And I won’t have it any other way.
Dolan says he doesn’t regret his times on set. He says he and his producer renounced their salaries, that they worked with actors willing to be paid less for the sake of the craft, that he, for the past fifteen years, has felt love and fulfillment on his productions. And I believe him. I also believe him when he says that he was misquoted saying art is meaningless and a waste of time, but rather, it now has lost its meaning to him. To be clear, I don’t blame Dolan, not in the slightest. At the end of the day, and if my minor in literature has given me any reading comprehension, I take Dolan’s post to mean that it isn’t the art itself that’s changed, it’s the world. The world is a different place now than it was fifteen years ago, both in a sociopolitical sense and for filmmakers. Audiences are different. Distribution and rights are different. The process itself is different. For many of us, art is still a solace, and an answer to the world’s troubles. To our own troubles, too. And if now, directing films isn’t that for Dolan anymore, none of us can blame him for wanting to stop. But even despite my understanding for his decision, it doesn’t make the announcement of it any less shocking. The best of reasoning (and this is the best of reasoning) doesn’t make the pill that the filmmaker who made you want to make films suddenly is quitting a month after you graduated from film school, any easier to swallow. Obviously I’m not going to stop doing what I want just because of this news, and obviously I support what’s best for the artists I care about, but it is disheartening. The Dazed article I linked said it best:
It’s a sad testament to the challenges facing independent filmmakers today that a director of such evident talent has felt the need to abandon his craft.
If we want to evolve, learn, and be enriched by the people around us, we need to support unique and unapologetic filmmakers like Dolan, not make their lives so miserable that quitting the artform they’ve practiced half their lives becomes the only viable path to inner peace. It’s a sad day for film and it’s sad day for me, but all there is to do is go back to that old faithful camping slogan: leave it better than you found it. Work to make this industry better, so we don’t lose more voices like Dolan’s. Support the WGA in their strike. Make some good art. I dunno - just, be a kind person. We need to now, more than ever. ⬥
Some stills from Dolan’s films:
