Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, the new film from Quebecois wunderkind Xavier Dolan features an all-star French cast (including Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel, Léa Seydoux and Nathalie Baye) in a tempestuous tale about the fraught reunion of a fractured family.
“Xavier Dolan’s Juste la Fin du monde (It's Only the End of the World) is histrionic and claustrophobic: deliberately oppressive and pretty well pop-eyed in its madness – and yet a brilliant, stylized and hallucinatory evocation of family dysfunction.
“It is an adaptation of a stage play of the same name by the prize-winning French dramatist Jean-Luc Lagarce, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1995. It is the story of a prize-winning French dramatist who returns to his hometown after an absence of more than a decade, with the intention of telling his family that he is dying. However much these family members might have wanted to keep things nice and polite, it is of course futile. The moment Louis steps through the door, the screaming starts.
“For most of the film, Dolan brings his camera tight in for extreme closeups on the characters’ faces. In fact, the action is almost just a sequence of faces. And Dolan keeps a clamorous orchestral score surging through the querulous dialogue.” - The Guardian