“No better way to start a new year than with a new filmmaker,” Film Independent curator Elvis Mitchell said before last night’s Film Independent at LACMA screening of Mommy, the fifth feature from 25-year-old writer-director Xavier Dolan. Mommy was Canada’s official submission for the Best Foreign Film Oscar race this year, but in a bit of an upset, it did not make the nine-film shortlist. “For those of you who don’t speak Canadian,” Mitchell said, “there are subtitles.”

The title character is Diane Després (played by frequent Dolan collaborator Anne Dorval), a widowed single mother overwhelmed by the challenges of raising her teenage son Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon), who struggles with ADHD and is prone to violent outbursts. The friendship and support of Diane’s shy new neighbor Kyla (Suzanne Clément) has a positive impact on all three of them, but Steve may be too much even for both women to handle.

Dolan has a multi-media perspective as a filmmaker; he is famously inspired by music, and said that hearing a single song can inspire a scene in his mind that can evolve into an entire film. “Music always comes at a very, very, very early stage,” he said during the Q&A after the screening.

Struck by how Dolan captures his actors’ faces, Mitchell asked whether photography is an influence on his work as well. “It is,” Dolan replied,” way more than movies, actually.” He named Nan Goldin’s work in particular as having had a huge impact on Mommy. “When you’re watching someone else’s film, you see the work and you can’t help but be contaminated by something, and reduce things,” he said. “I really find true inspiration in images, and sometimes literature.” Mitchell correctly guessed that Guy de Maupassant was an influence; “I read some [of his] short stories when I was in high school,” Dolan confirmed. “I was sort of obsessed with him.”

Dolan met Dorval when he was about 15. He interrupted a voice acting recording session to pitch her a script he had written, oblivious to how utterly inappropriate his behavior was. A few years later, Dorval and Dolan starred together in Dolan’s first feature, 2009’s I Killed My Mother. Mitchell commented on the similarities between the films, and between Dorval’s characters in them. “I love characters who are very expressive, and who are not afraid of their feelings or afraid of telling people the truth,” Dolan said. “Every character in Mommy has that problem with how society wants to label things and put everyone in boxes and in ghettos. It’s about breaking free from that ghetto…and realizing that you can’t really define who you are through other people’s eyes.”

Mommy defines its characters through Dolan’s observant eye—“I’ve been watching people since I’m four,” he said. “I’ve always paid attention to the way people laugh, they way they walk, their gait, their tics, the way they move… Every actor that I worship and I love, I think, is a watcher.” An actor himself, Dolan is sensitive to how performers bring more to a film than a script alone. “For me, details [are] what makes it alive,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a life they’ve never lived, or if it’s a situation they’ve never experienced, detail is what they will hold onto to really understand an experience. I think it’s really about adding the little details from life—these things that I’ve been watching forever.”

Mary Sollosi / Film Independent Blogger