Each creator looks at their characters, the material with which they work, from a position. Certain comedy (like the grotesque or the drama of the absurd, for example), he does it from above. The artist is the omniscient observer of a world that is necessarily ridiculous, incomprehensible, disproportionately minimal. He western, to quote the most classic of genres, does it from below. In his ideology, the protagonists of the exaggerated adventure of a universe without borders and pending to be conquered are myths, emblems, archetypes of civilization to come. And then there is the radical and patterned humanity of the authors who know themselves to be characters of themselves.
Ingmar Bergman, to cite the most human of divinities, he was referring to what his cinema makes up with the expression “wood and axe”. His life itself was the plot of his fiction, and the fiction was his life. The instrument with which she modeled and carved each of her fabulations was nothing other than the material itself of each one of them. The entire filmography of the Swede is at eye level with him, his characters are him and he is each of his creations. And so.
Let’s say Xavier Dolan belongs to this last group since practically his first film. At barely 19 years old, the Canadian director completed ‘I killed my mother’ (2009) and the world of cinema attended a cataclysm. And so, one after another, the next seven films of him. And so on until ‘The Night Logan Woke Up’ which, despite not being a film but a miniseries (Filmin), is the best portrait of himself, the point of arrival and culmination of almost everything, in a unique way of understanding the place of the artist in front of his art and in front of himself. Now, with a melodramatic gesture and something false (everything is said), the director says that he retires and he does so at the age (34 years) at which many start. And, for that of looking for some lyricism to what sounds more like an advertisement for a campaign of marketing well orchestrated, it would seem that everything makes sense. The emptying work to which he has devoted himself all these years well deserves an exit from the forum at the height, excessive, tragic, perfect… Few are as devoted to the role of Dolan as Dolan himself.
The night Logan woke up adapts a play Michel-Marc Bouchard, author who has already been used to compose ‘Tom on the farm’ (2013). The story of a family haunted by the past is told. Each chapter portrays each of its members. Some time ago, something happened that fractured them forever. Dolan shows the wounds and lets the blood flow. Nothing else. A beating of a homosexual seconded by a burning rainbow flag is the first image. The brutality of the sequence sets the tone. From the death of the matriarch backwards and as if it were a puzzle, the pieces gradually fit together in a narrative that moves with the same ease in thrillers as in melodramas, leaving room for laughter at times. hysterical force. The result is a prodigy of restlessness, nervousness and restlessness.
It would be said that the tape is pure Dolan from beginning to end. It has always been like this, but now more. From his most accomplished piece (‘Mommy‘, 2014) to his most confused and self-indulgent (‘Just the end of the world’2016), all his films are the same with their refined use of exaggeration as an expressive resource and with their obsessively closed themes: what if the family, what if the impossible mother-child relationship, what if the discovery of the identity… Dolan intuits that the rules are there to be broken and this is how he shows it in the way the camera pursues the gesture until it hides it, in the erratic use of formats or in the use of music, always against the logic of the narration.