ReFocus: the Films of Xavier Dolan

257 Pages·2019·5.571 MB·English

by  Andrée Lafontaine (editor)

ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan
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ReFocus: The International Directors Series
Series Editors: Robert Singer, Stefanie Van de Peer
and Gary D. Rhodes
ReFocus is a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the
interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of international film directors, from the
celebrated to the ignored, in direct relationship to their respective culture—its myths,
values, and historical precepts—and the broader parameters of international film
history and theory. The series provides a forum for introducing a broad spectrum of
directors, working in and establishing movements, trends, cycles and genres including
those historical, currently popular, or emergent, and in need of critical assessment or
reassessment. It ignores no director who created a historical space—either in or
outside of the studio system—beginning with the origins of cinema and up to the
present. ReFocus brings these film directors to a new audience of scholars and general
readers of Film Studies.
Titles in the series include:
ReFocus: The Films of Susanne Bier
Edited by Missy Molloy, Mimi Nielsen, and Meryl Shriver-Rice
ReFocus: The Films of Corneliu Porumboiu
Monica Filimon
ReFocus: The Films of Francis Veber
Keith Corson
R eFocus: The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky
Sergei Toymentsev
ReFocus: The Films of Jia Zhangke
Maureen Turim and Ying Xiao
ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan
Edited by Andrée Lafontaine
edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/refocint
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ReFocus:
The Films of Xavier Dolan
Edited by Andrée Lafontaine
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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish
academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social
sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values
to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website:
edinburghuniversitypress.com
© editorial matter and organization Andrée Lafontaine, 2019
© the chapters their several authors, 2019
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun—Holyrood Road
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Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in 11/13 Ehrhardt MT by
IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and
printed and bound in Great Britain
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 4457 6 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 4459 0 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 4460 6 (epub)
The right of Andrée Lafontaine to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright
and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
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Contents
List of Figures vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Acknowledgments xi
Film and Video Work by Xavier Dolan xii
Introduction 1
Andrée Lafontaine
Part 1 Queer Universalism
1. The Transgressive Cinema of Xavier Dolan 31
Fulvia Massimi
2. The Dolandrama: Queer Male Authorship and the Fabulous
Leading Lady 52
Julianne Pidduck
3. Xavier Dolan’s Backward Cinema: Straight Spaces, Queer
Temporality, and Genealogical Interruptions in Tom at the
Farm and It’s Only the End of the World 80
Florian Grandena and Pascal Gagné
Part 2 Local Auteur
4. Spaces and Times of Québec in Films by Xavier Dolan 101
Bill Marshall
5. Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué ma mère and Québec’s New Cinema of
mise-en-scène 119
Liz Czach
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vi CONTENTS
6. Transcreating Tom à la ferme and Juste la fin du monde 136
Marie Pascal
7. Xavier Dolan in India: The Alchemy of Film Viewing 156
Navaneetha Mokkil
Part 3 Millennial Auteur
8. Joy, Melancholy, and the Promise of Happiness in Xavier
Dolan’s Mommy 177
Mercédès Baillargeon
9. “I am looking for someone who understands my language
and speaks it”: Dolan’s Excessive Dialogues 191
Andrée Lafontaine
10. Fade to Grey: Dolan’s Pop Fashion and Surface Style 209
Nick Rees-Roberts
Bibliography 228
Index 239
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Figures
I.1 Xavier Dolan, early promotional portrait 2
1.1 The “queer chronology” of Dolan’s films 38
1.2 Outdated style in Tom à la ferme 39
2.1 Cultural capital: Chantale’s interior decor 67
2.2 Chantale Lemming speaks truth to power 69
2.3 “You! . . . Do I look fucking dead to you?” 69
2.4 Queer relations? Hubert in hot pursuit of his mother dressed
as a bride 70
2.5 A queer bond? Steve and Die dance to “On ne change pas” 72
4.1 Frames and spaces. Laurence Anyways 106
4.2 Interiors. Laurence Anyways 106
4.3 Doorways. Laurence Anyways 107
4.4 Balconville encounters. Laurence Anyways 108
4.5 Suburban thresholds. Laurence Anyways 109
4.6 To and from an island. Laurence Anyways 112
4.7 Embedded spaces of Québec. Tom à la ferme 113
5.1 Hubert at Julie’s “old fogey” house 130
5.2 Chantale and the pitiful Pierrot 130
5.3 Hubert at his father’s house 132
5.4 Principal’s office 133
5.5 Floral middlebrow middle ground 133
7.1 Fantasy sequence in Mommy 164
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Notes on Contributors
Mercédès Baillargeon is assistant professor of French and Francophone Stud-
ies in the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of
Maryland. Her book, Le Personnel est politique: Médias, esthétique et politique de
l’autofiction chez Christine Angot, Chloé Delaume et Nelly Arcan, was published
in 2019 by Purdue University Press. She has published several articles on
third-wave feminism, contemporary women’s writing and first-person narra-
tive, and Québec cinema, including a special issue of the journal Contempo-
rary French Civilization, co-edited with Karine Bertrand (Queen’s University,
Kingston) on the transnationalism of Québec cinema and (new) media. Her
current research explores the question of (post)nationalism in Québec cinema
of the new millennium.
Liz Czach is associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies
at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada). She researches and publishes
in the areas of film festivals, home movies, and amateur film, and Québec and
Canadian film. She was a programmer of Canadian film at the Toronto Interna-
tional Film Festival from 1995 to 2005. She is currently co-editing, with André
Loiselle, Cinema of Pain: On Quebec’s Nostalgic Screen.
Pascal Gagné is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Feminist and Gen-
der Studies, University of Ottawa (Canada). Pascal’s research and publications
focus on queer theory, collective memory, and affect. He has previously worked
for associations promoting LGBTQ rights, HIV/AIDS awareness, and agen-
cies supporting people with developmental disabilities to live in the commu-
nity. His doctoral studies are funded by the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council.
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Florian Grandena is associate professor in the Department of Commu-
nication at the University of Ottawa (Canada). He has published numerous
articles on contemporary queer-themed French feature films, and is preparing
a book on the films of Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau. Together with
Cristina Johnston (University of Stirling, UK), he is the co-editor of New Queer
Images: Representations of Homosexualities in Francophone Visual Cultures, and
Cinematic Queerness: Gay and Lesbian Hypervisibility in Contemporary Franco-
phone Feature Films (Peter Lang, 2011).
Andrée Lafontaine is Assistant Professor of Anglophone Literature and
Culture at the University of Tsukuba (Japan). She received a PhD in Film
and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University (Montréal, Québec),
and has previously worked at Aichi University. She was Managing Editor of
Synoptique—An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies, and has
published in the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, and
the Canadian Journal of Film Studies.
Bill Marshall has held posts in French Studies at the Universities of South-
ampton, Glasgow, and Stirling, and was Director of the Institute of Modern
Languages Research in the School of Advanced Study, University of London,
2011–14. Professor Marshall’s published works include Quebec National Cin-
ema (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), André Téchiné (Manchester
University Press, 2007), and The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and His-
tory (2009).
Fulvia Massimi holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Con-
cordia University (Montréal, Québec) and was a member of the editorial board
of Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies. Her research
focuses on local and global understandings of gender and nationhood in the cin-
emas of Québec, Flanders, and Scotland. Under the supervision of Tom Waugh,
her dissertation examines the renegotiation of male representations and national
identities in current subnational film industries and imaginaries, notably in the
films of Xavier Dolan. Her entry on Queer Canadian cinema, co-authored with
Tom Waugh, is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (2019).
Navaneetha Mokkil is assistant professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her areas of research include print
and visual cultures in India, public formations of sexuality, and transnational
circuits of world cinema. She completed her PhD in English and Women’s
Studies from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 2010. She is the author
of Unruly Figures: Queerness, Sex Work and the Politics of Sexuality in Kerala
(2019). Her articles on the non-linear imaginations of sexuality in Indian
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