Juste la fin du monde (2016)
Directed by Xavier Dolan

Film Review

With his sixth film, Juste la fin du monde, Quebecois director Xavier Dolan continues to divide the critics, but this time he gives his detractors more ammunition to throw at him, despite the fact (or because of the fact) that his film took the Jury Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016.  His latest screen offering is adapted from the 1990 stage play of the same title by Jean-Luc Lagarce, who died from AIDS in 1995 at the age of 38.  Scarcely recognised in his lifetime, Lagarce has since become one of the most widely performed contemporary playwrights in France today, and his autobiographical play has only recently (2010) being adapted for French television, by Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau.

Lagarce's play serves up some familiar Dolan material - the dysfunctional family, a gay central protagonist, a fraught mother-son relationship - but Dolan's typically self-indulgent approach appears to be completely at odds with the sober tone of the original huis-clos piece.  Dolan has already shown himself to be at his best in films that drew heavily on his own life experiences - J'ai tué ma mère (2009) and Les Amours imaginaires (2010).  Juste la fin du monde is the work of a very different author and Dolan is ill-suited to claim it as his own, so inevitably it ends up looking more like a grotesque pastiche of Lagarce's play than a sympathetic rendition.  Any subtlety in the original work, any emotional resonance, is pretty well lost after Dolan has daubed his own immodest signature all over it with his customary lack of restraint.

Juste la fin du monde is significant in that it is the first of Xavier Dolan's films to have an entirely French cast - in fact, it is a cast comprising some of the biggest name actors in France today.  Gaspard Ulliel, Nathalie Baye, Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard and Léa Seydoux are all gifted performers with star appeal and their presence together in one film certainly makes it a tantalising proposition.  But none of these great talents is well utilised by the film and most (Baye and Cassel in particular) fail to make their characters appear anything more than the blatant stereotypes that they are in Lagarce's original play.  Unwilling to alter a single word of Lagarce's text, Dolan must find other means to add substance to these ill-defined characters, but in doing so he makes them appear even more ridiculous and shallow.  Léa Seydoux is the only cast member not to have her acting credentials damaged by this film, partly because she is the most capable actor, but also because hers is the most sympathetically drawn and believable character.

Dolan is too talented, too creative and too endearingly flamboyant a filmmaker to deliver an outright turkey, and whilst his latest film can't helping sinking to the level of a second-rate psychodrama, it has its inspired moments that make up for the disappointments.  Juste la fin du monde is essentially nothing more than a wildly overdone piece of filmed theatre, but Dolan's individualistic flair (even if it takes histrionic excess a little too far on this occasion) prevents it from being a complete write-off.  The Ducastel-Martineau version may be more mundane but it is far more faithful to the original play and achieves what Dolan fails to do - which to gently engage our emotions instead of trying to beat them out of us with a jewel-encrusted sledgehammer.

Film Synopsis

Louis is a successful writer who hasn't seen his family for twelve years.  Now in his mid-thirties, he finds he has contracted AIDS and has only a short time left to live.  Deciding to reconcile himself with his family he returns to the region where he grew up but soon discovers that he cannot bring himself to communicate the news of his impending demise.  His mother is busy arranging a family get-together, his brother Antoine is unreasonably hostile and his sister Suzanne has her own share of woes.  The only person that Louis seems to be able to communicate with is Antoine's wife Catherine...