Xavier Dolan’s mother must feel very proud of him, and possibly a little wary. A busy child actor in Quebec, Dolan amassed a small fortune and, when he reached the age of majority, immediately spent $150,000 of his earnings to finance I Killed My Mother, his first feature film as writer-director. A semiautobiographical story about a closeted gay teenager (Dolan) locked in a battle of wills with his steely divorced mom (Anne Dorval), the movie drew a standing ovation at the Cannes film festival in 2009 and collected enthusiastic reviews when it was released in Europe and the U.S. Five years and four features later, Dolan was back at Cannes to claim a Jury Prize for Mommy, another tale of a teenage son and mother in a fight to the death. No one could call the movie a rehash, though, because Dolan’s take on the pain and pleasure of maternity had deepened significantly over those five years.
Hubert is 16, and you have to wonder whether another decade in the closet might turn him into the 25-year-old man, never named, whose accidental death, never specified, sets in motion the events of Tom at the Farm. Agathe (Lise Roy), his hauntingly bereaved mother, latches on to Tom all the more because her son stayed so far out of her reach. “Don’t you tell you’re leaving tomorrow,” Agathe admonishes Tom. “He always said that. You’ll stay.” Tom soon realizes that he’s been pulled into a fiction; menacing him in his bed that night is the other son, Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), who immediately pegs Tom as a con man and orders him to deliver a soothing eulogy at the funeral the next day, for his mother’s sake, before getting out of town. “If you speak, they’ll know my son was a good boy,” Agathe explains to Tom, exposing both her own heartbreak and the social rigidity that estranged mother and son.
Directed by Xavier Dolan
