Internal exile. Writing excess in Mommy

Abstract

Xavier Dolan was already trying out Mommy in his first feature film, the Cannes award-winner I killed my mother (J’ai tué ma mère, 2009). He not only directed it and acted in it, he wrote it when he was just 16. Between I killed my mother and Mommy we can read painful writings in the voice of a young author who does not try to hide the wounds of time. Quite the contrary: the two films released when Dolan was 20 and 25 are the mark of someone trying to test – and if something is tested it is because it has not been understood – the anger and excess of that very specific and turbulent time: adolescence. For this reason, Dolan uses uncontained melodrama, seriously challenging Hollywood’s restrained version of the genre. In this text, we study how Mommy writes the excess of melodramatic writing. In this, we are assisted by textual analysis as our methodology, without forgetting script details and concepts from psychoanalysis. On the surface, Mommy is an effusive work paying profound attention to tragic events. Its melodramatic view is a study of limits taken to the extreme. Its discourse runs from the most intimate (trembling words and bodies) to the framework for subjectivity (the family, social and institutional factors). The originality of his treatment of excess lies in the fact that it even affects the game of enunciation with the format of the film. Ultimately, although Mommy can seem like a banal, postmodern pop video, the enunciation takes on the seriousness of an argument that does not hold back from the study of emotions because it is devoted to listening – humanising the unbearable.