Mommy

Mommy (2014) is about a violent teenager living with his mother, and it was shot in a square frame. Diane takes her son Steve back from an institution. He is fifteen, with attention and anger problems; he was there because he started a fire. Removing him is legally possible but the consequences fall on her. Their neighbour Kyla is a teacher on leave who struggles to speak. The three of them build an arrangement and for a while it works. The pain of the film is how short a while. The image is in a 1:1 ratio, a perfect square. Both sides of the screen are black and the characters are pressed into a narrow space. It is not a stylistic display; it delivers the narrowness of their lives directly. Then in one scene Steve takes the edges of the frame in his hands and pushes them apart, and the image opens to widescreen. Nothing is explained. It is the moment he first believes things will be all right, and the film says that through form rather than words. The frame closes again later. Xavier Dolan was twenty five when he made it. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes, shared with Godard, who was eighty three at the time. The soundtrack is deliberately popular and emotional. It runs 139 minutes. Good for: art cinema, mother and child drama, and formal experiment. Less good for: there is a great deal of shouting, there is violence, and the ending is very heavy.