Film still - Juste la fin du monde © Shayne Laverdière, courtesy of Sons of Manual
Xavier Dolan is even more seasoned with Juste la fin du monde (It’s only the End of the World)
Such a young and yet such an important figure at the Festival de Cannes. Xavier Dolan created a sensation in 2010 with Les Amours imaginaires in Un Certain Regard. Two years later, he was back with Laurence Anyways, and went on to win the Jury Prize for Mommy in 2014. A member of last year's feature films jury, he is back in Competition with Juste la fin du monde, the adaptation of a stage play.
Juste la fin du monde is the story of a writer, Louis, who goes to visit his family to tell them he is dying. Xavier Dolan called on some of the most prominent French actors for this latest work: Gaspard Ulliel in the lead role, alongside Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydoux, Vincent Cassel and Nathalie Baye.
The inspiration for this sixth feature film came to him through his first muse, Anne Dorval. After their initial collaboration in J’ai tué ma mère, the actress shared with the director her recollection of a role in a play by Jean-Luc Lagarce, Juste la fin du monde. Xavier Dolan immersed himself in the text without finding any particular fascination there. It took him several years to grasp its cinematographic dimension:
“At last I understood the words, the emotions, the silences, the hesitations, the nervousness, the troubling flaws in the characters created by Jean-Luc Lagarce.”
Juste la fin du monde should signal a turning point in Xavier Dolan's career. It presents as a film that marks the director's maturity. After the explosion of emotions from the characters in Mommy, he has tackled the adaptation of a play, without completely erasing the specificity of the original script. In the same vein that infused the script by Lagarce, Dolan retains the awkwardness, the repetitions, the slips in the dialogues. This is Dolan's way of paying tribute to the theatre director, who died in 1995.
