{"id":98350,"date":"2019-05-28T08:00:30","date_gmt":"2019-05-28T15:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/?p=98350"},"modified":"2019-05-28T07:03:57","modified_gmt":"2019-05-28T14:03:57","slug":"cannes-2019-matthias-and-maxime-movie-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/cannes-2019-matthias-and-maxime-movie-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Cannes Journal: Matthias & Maxime"},"content":{"rendered":"

Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan returns to Cannes with Matthias & Maxime<\/em>, the story of two childhood friends who long have harbored a quiet, unresolved affection for one another.
\n<\/p>\n

Dolan of late is having a bit of an aesthetic crisis. Exploding on the international scene a decade ago with his Cannes debut I Killed My Mother<\/em>, the then-20-year-old was declared a wunderkind by many, a precocious auteur by others. Over the year,s he made film after film that played this prestigious festival, with several winning awards, including his masterpiece Mommy<\/em> and the flawed but commendable Grand Prix winner It’s Only the End of the World<\/em>. His English film The Death & Life of Jason Donavan<\/em> is a mess, despite an all-star cast and the promise of a crossover audience.<\/p>\n

Matthias & Maxime<\/em> is a return to the highly personal filmmaking that brought Dolan attention in the first place. He plays Max, an insecure young man with a birthmark covering the side of his face. His longtime friend Matt (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas) is a handsome young lawyer with a supportive girlfriend, but is torn by feelings of loss as Max is headed off to Australia for two years. When Max and Matt kiss as part of a film project, old feelings fully rekindle.<\/p>\n

With snarky references to Denys Arcand and other giants of Quebecois cinema from a generation before Dolan’s, the film wears its indie-Montreal credibility favorably. Unfortunately, his usual dramatic tics \u2013 the harsh and insecure mother, the doe-eyed young son struggling with identity \u2013 feel like we’ve tread this road too many times before. Most interesting is that the now-30-year-old Dolan is acting younger than his age. Where before there was always a sense that he was playing up the adult situtations, this movie feels practically adolescent in terms of emotional turmoil.<\/p>\n

The frustration is that the film feels like a missed opportunity, perhaps overburdened by expectations and Dolan’s continued insistence on acting, directing, and editing himself. He’s a fine performer \u2013 look for him in the part two of It<\/em> for a more prominent showcase to American audiences \u2013 but the connection feels more insular and needlessly self-centered by his taking one of the title roles.<\/p>\n

Matthias & Maxime<\/em> shows Dolan going back to comfortable territory, but what’s clear is that maybe the spark of his direction needs a bit of distance in order to fully shine again. Maybe after a bout of doing some other work as solely actor, gaining both career and life experience, he’ll return fully to form. Instead, we’re granted a middling if occasionally moving effort from the man, far superior than his previous, disowned English flop, but nowhere near the power or prestige of his previous films.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan returns to Cannes with Matthias & Maxime, the story of two childhood friends who long have harbored a quiet, unresolved affection for one another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":298,"featured_media":98351,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4508],"tags":[2999,1234,10860,7833],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98350"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/298"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98350"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98350\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98353,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98350\/revisions\/98353"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}