If you are Xavier Dolan and your last three movies have failed critically, and yes I am including the just-premiered “Matthias & Maxime,” then what should be your next move?
Dolan has been a polarizing figure for many cinephiles these last few years. After surprising the film world, in his mid-20s to boot, with well-received fare such as “Laurence Anyways,” “Mommy,” and "Tom at the Farm," the way he has concocted his movies ever since has been polarizing at best for critics and audiences. It all started with 2016's "It's Only the End of the World," a film that won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes but not without being dubbed one of the worst movies to ever be awarded at the festival. Sure, many French audiences and critics dug it, but the overall consensus stateside was not pleasant. To make things worse, Dolan was about to embark on his first English-language film, "The Death and Life of John F. Donovan," which turned out to be a disasterpiece of the highest-order. What do you make exactly of a movie that completely wiped clean a Jessica Chastain performance from its final cut? The film never got released in France, a country that adores Dolan’s cinema, nor in his native Canada.
“Matthias & Maxime” didn’t help alleviate the bad streak. Its premiere at Cannes last week was met with decidedly mixed reactions. I gave it a D in my review, saying that as “a far more quiet and distanced work from his previous outings, it's an attempt to mature and move forward as an artist, but the movie proves he’s just not ready for that kind of statement.”
Well now Dolan is saying, as he enters his 30s, that he wants to put directing on hold and start acting. “Actually I want to act in my 30s, that’s what I really want to do. I find it more rewarding and more liberating than directing movies,” said Dolan, in a new interview with Collider.
He later added his two cents on the bad reviews, “I get so many compliments and also so many hateful reviews,” he said. “A lot of them are understandable; a lot of them are stupid. I spent ten years trying to find myself through the criticism of others and I don’t feel that necessity anymore.”
He has yet to find his inner zen in dealing with the bad reviews in more mature and coherent ways.
The short version: "Woman Unknown" was a compromise. The jury deadlocked over "Possible Love" and "NAZA," not able to com to terms, fell back on their #3, May el-Toukhy's film.