Xavier Dolan (Montreal, 34 years old) has always lived at full speed. At 19 he made his debut with a film that was celebrated in Cannes and opened all the doors of auteur cinema for him. He made eight films in a decade, with which he asserted his own language, a mannerist and theatrical cinema that rehabilitated the typical quirks of a 1990s video clip: rich colors, slow-moving images, songs by Celine Dion sung like national anthems . Not for that reason did he refrain from penetrating the darkest part of human existence, the darkest families, the most toxic friendships, and the love he felt to be an incurable disease.
And now, at a young age, Dolan is retiring. “I’m quitting filmmaking and directing,” he says via video call of his unexpected early retirement. “I no longer have the desire or the strength to get involved in a project for two years and then hardly anyone sees it. I put too much passion into it to endure so many disappointments. I wonder if my cinema is bad and I know it isn’t. Before he hung up, he was filming The Night Logan Woke Up, his first series, which Filmin has just released. His new work is a psychological thriller about a family divided by a tragic event 30 years ago, who meet to watch over the body of his mother, a politician at the time of the Quebec referendum who had to interrupt her career to attend a family event. .
There will be no more films or videos for Adele. Dolan will limit itself to advertising. “I’m going to do a series in English for HBO that I committed to doing before the pandemic, and then I’ll leave,” says the director
Despite its author’s international reputation, it will only be shown in four countries: his native Canada, France, Japan and Spain. Why didn’t anyone else buy it? Because it was shot in French, because there were only five episodes?” he wonders. “I didn’t make anything from the show, I put my salary into the production and my dad had to lend me money. It’s a very thankless process, I’m tired and discouraged. The simplest solution is to advertise and build me a house in the country.” That’s his plan. He will also not be making any more videos for Adele. “I have already done two, I think they are enough. Hayao Miyazaki says filmmaking only causes suffering. I confirm it.” Although he has one last bullet left to burn. “Before the pandemic, I promised to do an embryonic series with HBO in English. I will keep my word and then stop.
The protagonists of the series “The night Logan woke up” by Xavier Dolan, recently released on Filmin.
His project begins with the death of this oppressive matriarch, a classic character in his cinema. His first film was titled I Killed My Mother. They are also abundant in the rest of his filmography, which bears titles such as “Los amores imaginarios”, “Laurence Anyways”, “Mommy” or “Only the end of the world”. “It seems anecdotal to me, my cinema doesn’t just talk about it,” protests the director, who also doesn’t like comparisons to Pedro Almodóvar, which seem “reductive and a bit homophobic”. It is said that Dolan is making a film for women, when in fact he was also talking about men. His new series is the best example of this: at the center of the story are three brothers and one of them’s best friend, examples of a fragile and toxic masculinity. “I’m interested in filming men with inner dilemmas, a little bit monstrous, with demons they’re fighting, expressing themselves through verbal and often physical violence,” he admits. “They hide a deep rift and a great need to be loved. Life hurt them and they hurt themselves. They don’t love each other, so they don’t know how to love.
Dolan doesn’t think these old-fashioned men are on the brink of extinction despite societal changes. “Male violence scares me more and more because I don’t know how to calm it down,” says the director, whose films are more about the rejection of homosexuality. “When I see bearded men protesting LGBTI+ history classes outside a California school, it strikes me as a picture from the end of the world. I’m scared of a civil war sparked by intolerance, by fear of the difference we represent. They are convinced that we want to subdue them, even though we have no will to dominate anyone. Our aspiration is to live and let others live.”
“To see protests against the LGBTI+ collective seems like a picture of the end of the world. They think we want to dominate them when we have no will to dominate anyone.”
Dolan’s departure is a clear disappointment. It seemed like he was about to conquer the world, but his rise to fame was slowed down by the failure of ‘My Life’ with John F. Donovan, his unsuccessful debut in English, starring the likes of Kit Harington, Natalie Portman or Susan Sarandon in the cast. (plus Jessica Chastain, cut out in the montage). After a long pregnancy, the project spiraled out of control. “It’s a film that I enjoy, although I haven’t been able to go as deep as I would have liked, for reasons audiences are better off unaware of,” he evades. He later returned to his native Quebec, where he made a more modest film, Matthias & Maxime, and then this series, which saw him return to his first love: television.
“The series was my first exposure to the art of storytelling. I am the son of a single mother who watched Canadian soap operas non-stop. As a teenager, I took refuge in WB’s American series dubbed into French, such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Smallville, Roswell, and Charmed, and then I got hooked on HBO shows like Die Sopranos” or “Six Feet Under”. that this series wants to pay tribute to,” he assures. The Night Logan Woke Up contains the codes of a TV from another era, from simple subplots to a penchant for the cliffhanger, which Dolan embraces without any irony. “Unlike other directors, I didn’t want to make a series that looked like a movie. “I wanted to make good television,” he says. It’s a good way to come full circle: go back to basics.
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