Cannes 2016: It's Only The End of the World, film review - Makes EastEnders look like an oasis of peace

Set in real time, there is no previous investment with the charactetrs, making it hard to care, says David Sexton
David Sexton1 June 2016

Twenty-seven-year old French-Canadian Xavier Dolan is considered a wunderkind by some here at Cannes, his first feature I Killed My Mother, written when he was just 16, having premiered in Director's Fortnight way back in 2009 and received a standing ovation and several awards. In 2014, Mommy (spot the thread?) shared the Jury Prize in the main competition and went on to take the César for Best Foreign Film that year. I found its hysterical Oedipal shrieking almost unendurable but I was in a minority.

Dolan's latest offering is a little different, being based on a 1990 play of the same name by the French playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce, now on French academic syllabuses, about a successful young playwright who returns to his estranged family, for one meal, after an absence of 12 years, to tell them that he is dying (Lagarce himself died of Aids at the age of 38 in 1995). For the first time, Dolan has recruited a really big name French cast, moreover.

Gaspard Ulliel (young Hannibal in Hannibal Rising, Saint Laurent in Saint Laurent, the face of Chanel's fragrance Bleu de Chanel) plays the hero, or as it might be martyred saint, the gay playwright Louis, who just had to flee his ghastly home, staying in touch while he found fame with no more than brief postcards, until forced to this extremity. He is handsome, aquiline, long-suffering, composed and reserved, indeed famous in the family for saying only three words at a time.

It doesn't take long to understand why when you meet the horrors who constitute his nearest if not dearest. His mother Marine (Nathalie Baye, sailing grandly over the top) is an intolerable, indeed apparently mad, egotist, the most overbearing monster (Dolan is a leading specialist in psycho-mums).

His younger sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux), whom he hardly knows since she grew up after his departure, is a defeated junkie who is never going to make it out of this hell-hole. But it is his ragingly angry, jealous, violently unreasonable brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel) who makes this family reunion into a real torture session, unleashing all the resentment and vindictiveness he has been nurturing all these years – while incessantly bullying his timid wife Catherine (Marion Cotillard) so much that she stumbles over her words, trying helplessly to make amends.

So the entire atmosphere of this film is one of a family viciously rowing and shrieking at each other non-stop, an atmosphere that for some is the very essence of theatre, but for others just makes EastEnders looks like an oasis of peace, light and understanding. Given that it takes place in pretty much real time (it's a play after all) and therefore we have no prior investment in these characters, it is hard to care: I just longed for them to stop. There is one sympathetic moment, when poor Catherine is about to offer more excuses to Louis and he silently puts his finger to his lips, and she does indeed button it.

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Dolan has stylized the film by making it a series of extreme close-ups of the faces of the actors, in saturated colour, thus enhancing the claustrophobia and oppression he seeks. However, he has not found any way at all – a brief car trip shared by Louis and Antoine to buy cigarettes being the nearest to an expedition – in which to make this play into a moving picture instead of a film of a play, so it is powerfully reminiscent of other horrific stage-adaptations such as that of as Tracy Letts's August, Osage County (which at least had Streep giving it her all) and Roman Polanski's version of Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage.

One structural device is provided by a cuckoo clock, recurrently seen ticking, not to mention celebrating the hour, as a way of ratcheting up tension perhaps. The big narrative question here is just when poor Louis (framed often like a suffering holy man in an indifferent Spanish Baroque religious painting) will be able to find the right moment of calm and quiet to break through this appalling family squabbling to tell them his grave news, that he has not long to live – or whether he will indeed ever find that moment? I can only say that, in the film's one magical realist coup de théâtre, at the very end the cuckoo actually bursts out of the clock, flies squawking round the room somehow, and then expires on the floor. Me too, me too.

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