ReFocus: The Films of Xavier Dolan ed. by Andrée Lafontaine (review)

Whatever you think of him, Wunderkind or enfant terrible, in terms of international recognition Xavier Dolan has undeniably risen to the forefront of a formidable group of auteur directors from Québec. His films reveal a meticulous aesthetic sense and grapple with the most pressing personal and social issues of the new millennium: evolving notions of family and gender identity. Their complexity and timeliness has already attracted more scholarly attention than most Québécois directors since Denys Arcand, and this collection of essays edited by Andrée Lafontaine, published in Edinburgh University Press’s new ReFocus: The International Directors Series, further codifies his significance. With its nine original essays and one reprint, coupled with a considerable scholarly apparatus, this “first book-length anthology on Xavier Dolan” (23) is an important contribution to Canadian film studies.

Lafontaine’s substantial “Introduction” provides an overview of Dolan’s career, including the production history and reception of his films through Juste la fin du monde (2016), with brief coverage of The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (2018) and Matthias et Maxime (2019). She also discusses his two significant music videos for Adèle’s Hello (2015) and Indochine’s College Boy (2013). Lafontaine clearly states the volume’s wider goal of “mak[ing] an intervention on the global reach of small national and subnational cinemas, and us[ing] Dolan’s cinema as a departure point to reconsider the position of Québec film and cultural imaginary within a global cinematic culture, as well as the intersections between national, millennial, and queer filmmaking” (23). The volume’s division into three sections, “Queer Universalism,” “Local Auteur,” and “Millennial Auteur,” reveals how it meets this last aim. With contributors hailing from Canada, the UK, France, and even India, the volume’s international scope is clear, and a filmography, bibliography, index, and twenty-one illustrations complement its contents.

Many of Dolan’s films, like Laurence Anyways (2012) and Tom à la ferme (2013), posit gender identity and family relationships as their core thematics, but even those that engage other topics normalize queerness as an identitary position in the twenty-first century West by their inclusion of LGBTQ+ identified characters. Essays by Fulvia Massimi, Julianne Pidduck, and Florian Grandena and Pascal Gagné in part 1 clearly establish Dolan’s international significance as a queer filmmaker and a maker of queer film. Massimi’s chapter, “The Transgressive Cinema of Xavier Dolan,” “unpack[s] the transgressive nature of Dolan’s cinematic imaginaries and trajectories” (32), following Thomas Waugh’s The Romance of Transgression in Canada (2006). Massimi specifically looks at the “family-nation” connection (33), drawing on queer and feminist theories “to understand how Dolan’s cinema performs a counter-reading of normalized and normative conceptions of Québec’s masculine national narrative” (33) in his complete oeuvre through Mommy (2014). Pidduck’s “The Dolandrama: Queer Male Authorship and the Fabulous Leading Lady” examines the central female characters played in Dolan’s films by his fetish actresses Suzanne Clément and Anne Dorval, with more extended analyses of J’ai tué ma mère (2009) and Mommy. Pidduck’s title, calqued on the description of Pedro Almodóvar’s films as “Almodramas,” signals how the essay addresses the specific style and aesthetic unity of the young Québécois’s oeuvre, and how Dolan has worked to establish himself as an auteur through a saturated media presence. Grandena and Gagné tackle the topic of “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.” Examining Dolan’s deployment of the melodramatic mode, they outline his use of “queer time” and “backwardness” in these film adaptations of plays by Michel Marc Bouchard and Jean-Luc Lagarce, respectively.

Although Dolan’s québécitude is also addressed in the previous section, essays by Bill Marshall, Liz Czach, and Marie Pascal in part 2 look more specifically at the intersection...