Uncompromising artists are a dying breed. In an economy where movies are investments and need to make their money back, they are adapted to please the most people possible even if it demands major compromise on the integrity of their vision. Xavier Dolan is somewhat of a child prodigy in the Canadian cinema landscape. He's only 25 years old and yet TOM À LA FERME is his fourth full-length feature film. He is also our only director regularly selected for international film festivals. So far, I industriously avoided his movies because his flamboyant hair annoyed me. Fortunately, young Xavier tamed the lion who lived on his head and directed TOM À LA FERME, a movie that's suspenseful, clever and pretty damn uncompromising.
So Tom (Xavier Dolan himself) is a city dweller, a copywriter in an ad agency, traveling to the countryside to attend his boyfriend Guillaume (Caleb Landry Jones)'s funeral. Nobody in his lover's family seems to know who he is, though. Even worse, they don't seem to understand he was homosexual. People in the country have their own ways and Tom soon feels trapped by this family where important matters are never discussed and violent son Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) has free reign to do whatever he wants. Tom is far away from everything he knows, confused, freightened and dealing with a threat that he doesn't fully understand in Francis. He is also strangely attracted to this life so different to his. Life on a farm is the real thing. It can make you feel alive as much as it cal kill you.
If I'm reviewing TOM À LA FERME here, it's because 1) it's pretty good and 2) it exists in english *. It made its international film festival run under the title TOM AT THE FARM. It was reviewed in Variety, The Guardian, The Telegraph and several other serious publications. So I'm not trying to push a local product on you, this is the real deal.
That said, TOM À LA FERME is kind of gay. What I mean by that is that Xavier Dolan is homosexual and it's something that's important for him to discuss in his movies. I'm cool with the idea as long as it's not done through needless provocation and I gotta say, Dolan discusses homosexuality in a clever, subtle and engaging way in TOM À LA FERME. There is a tender, hilarious and sexually charged barn Tango scene that was a high point of the movie for me, that illustrated the complexity of the relationship between Tom and Francis so much better than straight dialogue could've. Xavier Dolan speaks to his viewers as intelligent beings, yet stresses that being a young homosexual is still hard (sometimes life-or-death hard) in some places and his allegorical approach works wonders to keep his message strong throughout.
Another discombobulating hairstyle that Xavier Dolan fortunately only sported for the movie.
Message aside, TOM À LA FERME is all about the atmosphere. After viewing the movie with my friend Frank, the first thing we argued about is what decade it was supposed to happen in. Frank was saying it was set in the eighties and my point was that it could've very well been set in our decade. Xavier Dolan nails, and I mean N-A-I-L-S, the intemporality of rural areas. It's a seemingly realistic variable that boosts the mythos of the screenplay. See, the movie is based on the work of playwright Michel-Marc Bouchard and it's basically a domestic drama. Xavier Dolan transfigured this movie by creating a rural purgatory where people can never get away from who they are and what they've done. Doing that while keeping true to the reality of farmers today is quite a feat.
TOM À LA FERME takes no prisonners. It stays true to its powerful vision and delivers a bleak, yet oddly romantic movie about mourning. It gets a little contemplative at times, falls in love with its own shots. Has scenes who seem to be lasting way long than they should. I'd be hypocritical to claim that Xavier Dolan does it worse than some other arthouse directors though. He keeps his contemplative fugues generally under control and I like this kind of digression better than having to suffer another iteration of the hero's journey. What I'm saying is that it's not an important enough factor to ruin the experience. Far from it. Depending on what happens next, I may or may not climb aboard the Xavier Dolan bandwagon. TOM À LA FERME might not have convinced me on its own, but it sure was intriguing.
* Subtitled or translated, I'm not sure which.