Canada has chosen Xavier Dolan’s Mommy as their official submission to the foreign language Oscar competition. With so much to despair about the lack of inspiration in filmmaking, Dolan bursts through convention by reinventing his own brand of storytelling, using pure imagination and innovation to create something unlike anything else you’ll see this year. On the festival circuit, audiences have been embracing this exuberant, insane film about “motherhood.”
In the tradition of Edward Albee, Billy Wilder and Ken Russell, Dolan unzips the volatile mother/son bond with a mother who should never have been a mother and a son trying to cope with his own mental illness and inability to control himself. Dolan directs like Van Gogh painted – passionately, with prime colors and broad strokes, on the edge of insanity always, listening to a drumbeat that comes only once or twice in a generation.
Great writing, directing, acting – from the ground up. These tools do not come from any branded toolbox. These are original characters and an original story and easily one of the best films of 2014.