Juste la fin du monde

Xavier Dolan, the newest cinema enfant-terrible, is polarizing already, but his newest film has the potential to make a wider gap between those who love him and those who believe he is frankly overrated. Juste la Fin du Monde surrounds Dolan with some of the best french actors nowadays to tell the story of a writer who goes back to his family home after 12 years to tell their relatives that he is going to die soon, again Dolan facing his recurrent theme, unhealthy family relations, resulting again in the realization that those who we love the most are the ones who will destroy us. Yes, we know that Dolan's films will always have a lot of drama and won't be short in tears and shouts, but he is great with the actors, he knows exactly how to work with them so all this intensity doesn't feel excessive, all of his characters are round and complex, and he knows how to use the camera to accentuate the deep personalities of their characters. Here, are treated with a lot of close ups, that let us savour the fantastic facial expressions of such an amazing cast, Marion Cotillard is the most notable here, because her gestures say more than what the (extense) dialogue express, and is through them that we discover the warmth inside this vulnerable woman, also paying attention to the subtle shifts in the expressions of Vincent Cassel, because those are the ones that fill this neurotic character with humanity and save them of being plainly obnoxious. It's also remarkable the use of the space, specially in the cinematography, but also in the editing, that can make this house at times big and filled with textures and ambients, and at times the most claustrophobic tiny little hole. Dolan is not subtle with light and how he uses them to enhance a certain emotion, but somehow he is still very effective at it, turning cold spaces into much more warm or introspective moments just by changing the lights.

And by this point we know that Dolan can make a pivotal and electrifying moment of his films with a montage against a song, (how fantastics are The Knife's Pass this On in Les Amours Imaginaires or Oasis' Wonderwall in Mommy), and this time he treats us again to beautiful sequences to Grimes' Genesis, and even he manages to resignificate the obnoxious europop song Dragostea Din Tei, but we need to concede that this time, no matter how beautiful they are, they don't get much to the narrative and he is abusing on the quantity of them.

Probably it's not the best, and even not the most experimental Dolan film, but the way that he keeps developing a personal style that embraces both the content and the structure, giving us a perfectly Dolanesque (yes, after six films is safe to say that there are enough reasons to use that word) experience, is a perfectly valid argument to keep holding Dolan at the front of the new generation of filmmakers (sorry, Damien Chazelle).