Film: I KILLED MY MOTHER (J’ai tué ma mère) April 15, 2010

Part of the 2010 Wisconsin Film Fest

Wisconsin Premiere

Directed By: Xavier Dolan (IMDB)
writer/producer/art direction: Xavier Dolan
director of photography: Stéphanie Weber-Biron
art direction: Xavier Dolan
wardrobe: Nicole Pelletier
editor: Hélène Girard
sound: Sylvain Brassard
original score: Nicholas S. L’Herbier
cast: Anne Dorval, Xavier Dolan, Suzanne Clement, François Arnaud, Patricia Tulasne, Niels Schneider, Monique Spaziani

When Xavier Dolan was in high school, he “wrote a story about an infantile hatred because I’d been encouraged by an unconventional teacher to write about issues that were intimate and close to my heart. I called the story ‘Matricide.’ I thought I’d leave it at that forever.” But the young Dolan, who had been acting in commercials and French-Canadian films, turned the story into the script that became I Killed My Mother, a breathtaking debut feature about a single mother and her gay adolescent son, played by Dolan himself. It skitters between droll comedy and very complex emotions drawn from their hostile codependence. Hubert is an angsty art student, desperate to get out of the house and become his own man. He pushes back against everything Chantale, his daffy mother, does (Anne Dorval, deliciously irritating), while she is oblivious to, or maybe just ignores, his petulance. (There is a slight resemblance to Celia Imrie playing Una Alconbury in Bridget Jones’s Diary, but this is a very different movie). Eventually, though, his youthful rages get under her skin and she calls in Hubert’s distant father to help sort him out. “In the vein of Ma Vie en Rose…and other gay adolescent coming-of-age films of comic rebellion, it’s a congeries of brilliantly achieved cinematic moments and repetitive, massively self-indulgent gestures of acting out.” — Peter Brunette, Hollywood Reporter. I Killed My Mother was Canada’s official entry for Best Foreign Language Film, Academy Awards. Winner, C.I.C.A.E. Award, Prix Regards Jeune, and Prix SACD, 2009 Cannes Film Festival. 2009 Toronto, Vancouver, AFI, Taipei, Palm Springs, and Rotterdam Film Festivals. 2009, 100 mins, digital video, in French with English subtitles

Official Website: http://filmguide.wifilmfest.org/tixSYS/2010/filmguide/Country/CC