“I’ve seen tons of kids in and out of here. We save some, we lose some.” The director of a juvenile facility (Michèle Lituac) looks directly at Die (Anne Dorval), trying to explain the limits of what they might be able to do. The kid in question at this moment is Die’s son Steve (Antoine Olivier Pilon), who’s about to be released from the institution where he’s spent several years following an episode where a fire he set in school injured another boy. He’s sure he’ll be fine (“I’ve got a job”), Die is hopeful, but the director remains cautious, and reminds Die that she’ll have an option if things don’t work out, namely, a controversial (fictional and vaguely futuristic) law that allows parents to commit difficult children pretty much instantly.
This bit of information hangs over mother and son’s departure from the institution at the start of Mommy. The differences between them are at once vast and minimal: he’s 15, noisy and vibrant, alternately aggressive and adoring; she’s middle-aged and widowed, wears much makeup and decals on her snug jeans, and doesn’t precisely have a job. Her home is small, tucked into a neighborhood where people watch each other through windows from across the street, Almost as soon as they arrive, he looks too large for the space. He’s got impulses beyond his control, and because he’s a man-sized boy, he can seem sweet, but also menacing at the very same time. Die is reluctant to see and know this, presuming, or just imagining, she can manage him.
Can Steve be saved? Will he be lost? And in either case, who’s responsible, when and how? These broad, unanswerable questions structure Xavier Dolan’s movie, give it weight, and shape it even as it looks about to become unmoored, which is often. One of the grounding elements is the movie’s actual shape, its 1:1, or square, aspect ratio, suggesting Die and Steve’s combative too-closeness, their limited options and horizons, their mutual fears, desires, and desperations. As their needs — pathological and utterly predictable — consume them, you see they’re less individual than representative, speaking to a culture expecting so much of mothers. As Steve wants his mother for himself, her attention and her devotion, he can’t understand her efforts to look out for him, for instance, her decision to seduce a lawyer from down the street who might help with a civil lawsuit filed against Steve. The son sees the suitor as a threat; she sees him as a means to reconfirm her desirability. From this, an awkward, stupid showdown in a bar leads to violence and tears, less urgent than ordinary.
It’s gimmicky that this and other chaos explodes inside the small square space, but the framing, created by cinematographer André Turpin, makes sense for the film’s other grounding element, Die and Steve’ new neighbor, Kyla (Suzanne Clément). A teacher by training, she sees the problems embodied by Steve (and Die too) from a number of angles, including her own apparent psychic fragility. Kyla lives with a husband who seems rather irrelevant until film’s end, she’s not worked for some time, she stammers, she’s timid, and she suppresses her own rage at life’s fundamental unfairness, which helps her to sympathize with both Steve and Die. In need of money and purpose, Kyla agrees to homeschool the boy while Die finds various ways to make a living.
All three individuals remain alone during the movie, but they also mirror one another, and trade roles: object and subject, adult and child, teacher and student. The square frame reinforces your sense that they’re not going anywhere, even if they move frantically, drinking or dancing or flirting, sort of and unnervingly. This last is key to the film’s general discomfort for viewers. Mommy reminds you that mothers are not supposed to be sexual, and that children and everyone else, apparently, need boundaries on mothers’ behaviors. The title speaks to the tensions that Die and Steve can never resolve, that Kyla ignites even as she wants not to see, that makes their layers and complications so volatile, so exhilarating and then, in an instant, so sad, so frustrating.
Mommy insists on such troubles, not only as spectacle for viewers but also as experience. This is a hard movie to watch, and while you might take issue with characters’ choices and representations, they’re less available for your judgment than for your consideration. Your difficulty is not precisely the same as Die, Steve or Kyla’s, but it shapes your experience of the movie about them, makes it less coherent and maybe more affecting. The movie is too obvious in its visual framing, characters’ physical and other impediments, and narrative telegraphing. It’s too erratic, contrived, and self-absorbed, a sensibility that might be understood as reflecting its characters. Its rawness too might seem of a piece with its story of people ill equipped to live the lives they’re dealt. Lost, they want so badly to be found, to be saved, but the movie doesn’t imagine that for them.