Cannes Review: Xavier Dolan’s Shrill, Shrieking Drama ‘It’s Only The End Of The World’

It’s a fairly prevalent fantasy among petulant teenagers to avenge themselves on their families, who are stupid and mean and don’t understand anything, by imagining just how sad and sorry everyone would be if it turned out they were dying. Xavier Dolan‘s Cannes Competition title “It’s Only The End Of The World” is basically that fantasy, filmed. Although apparently adapted from a play by Jean-Luc Lagarce, it’s simply impossible to believe that a story this stridently self-pitying could not refer, more or less explicitly to writer/director Dolan himself. And indeed if, as the framing, dialogue, voiceover narration and basically everything else about the movie encourages, we read a degree of self-referentialism into the story, it suggests a level of martyred self-involvement on Dolan’s part that is tantamount to a persecution complex. Why and where exactly the 27-year-old Cannes Jury Prize-winner (for the thrillingly gonzo, indelibly vibrant “Mommy“) gets the impression that he is so hard done by is a bit of a mystery, but ironically, “It’s Only The End of the World,” reinforces the very negative impressions he may have designed it to address.

Successful writer and playwright Louis, played by Gaspard Ulliel with the damp eyes of the deeply misunderstood and the condescending wistfulness of the soon to perish, is on an airplane flying home for the first time in 12 years. This we hear from his opening voiceover, which comes after the irritatingly offhand and completely pointless text “Somewhere, a while ago already,” and which fills us in on the important stuff, namely that Louis is visiting his family to tell them that he is dying. We never find out what of, or how soon it will occur, but presumably it’s from something non-disfiguring such as might have afflicted a Romantic poet, consumption maybe, or The Vapors.

Anxiously awaiting his arrival are his mother Martine, a nightmare of overcoiffed hair and tacky manicure played by Nathalie Baye; Suzanne, the younger sister he scarcely saw grow up played by Lea Seydoux in a performance of pouty hero-worship; Antoine, Louis’ hair trigger thundercloud of an elder brother embodied by one-man weather system Vincent Cassel; and Antoine’s wife Catherine, a nervy little startled fawn of a person whose main function is to bleat “Antoine!” pleadingly when her verbally abusive husband gets verbally abusive. This last, amazingly, is played stutteringly by Marion Cotillard in one of the great actress’ very least great performances.

No sooner has Louis arrived, all hesitant embraces and stumbling half-kisses, then, one by one every single relationship under that roof self-immolates in one dubiously motivated firestorm of shrieked recrimination after another — saintly, doomed Louis can only look on with Messianic compassion as these shouty narcissists unleash a dozen years’ worth of resentments on each other and on him. If only they knew… he seems to be thinking to himself with the long-game wisdom of the terminally ill, but he can never seem to find the right moment to drop the bombshell. Though if you look at it from the audience’s point of view, we’re already enduring such an ongoing blitzkrieg of hysteria, that it’s hard to see how many other civilian casualties could possibly have been incurred, and in fact it would have been far kinder to have dropped the A-bomb early and been done with it. But then, of course, Louis would have no excuse for that exquisite air of “I’ve got a secret and it’s suuuuper tragic” and it really seems like that would be something hard for him to part with.

It’s a very difficult visit (understatement), punctuated by occasional quiet spells when Louis locks gazes with Catherine (for some reason) or reminisces about his first love, or simply takes seeming eons, and a multitude of shot/reverse shot cuts, to answer the most straightforward of questions. But mostly, every interaction is fraught with regret and resentment and turns on a dime from loving to hateful, in the most mystifyingly high-anxiety manner. As tortured as he is by it all (everyone is scared of everyone in this household, which we know because almost everyone delivers the line “I’m scared” at some point) all the drama actually just serves as another big ego trip for Louis: it confirms just how very, very important he was to these people, even while he was off being successful and celebrated far, far away. None of the other characters have any depth, they’re simply sounding boards and reflective surfaces for him, constantly telling or showing him just how much his departure wounded them, and presumably winking out of existence the second he leaves the room, or blinks.

Dolan’s undeniably exciting filmmaking craft, however, far outstrips his storytelling here, and everything from the saturated palette to a few nice surreal flourishes with a cuckoo clock, to the now-trademark use of appalling pop music blared out like it’s the “Carmina Burana” gives ‘The End of The World’ at least the look and feel of something much better. But having recruited as fine a cast of French-speaking thesps as has ever been assembled, and marshalled a strong behind-the-camera team, Dolan’s usually exuberant egotism is here taken so seriously that what we’re left with is a shrieking bore, without a single character worth rooting for, least of all the puddle of maudlin self-pity at its center.

Wunderkind and enfant terrible  are sobriquets often appended to Dolan’s name, but in fairness the screechy, mawkish “It’s Only the End Of The World” does suggest that the time for comparing him to a child is past. Here after the leap forward in maturity that “Mommy,” for the most part, represented, this does feel like a regression, but not to childhood, instead it appears to be the work of a sulking, self-conscious teenager, locked in his bedroom with his music blaring, feeling like the most misunderstood genius who never asked to be born. [C-]

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