It’s Only The End Of The World (Juste La Fin Du Monde)
SPEC D: Xavier Dolan. Canada/France. 95 min. Sep 11, 9:15 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 1 Sep 11, 9:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2 Sep 11, 9:45 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 3 Sep 18, 9:30 pm, TIFF Bell Lightbox 2. Rating: NN
Jean-Luc Lagarce’s 1990 stage play about a young playwright who returns home after a 12-year absence to tell his family he’s dying becomes a suffocating experience in writer/director Dolan’s hands.
He’s assembled the prodigious talents of Gaspard Ulliel, Nathalie Baye, Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel and Léa Seydoux, but gives them nothing to do but snap or scream at each other. Worse, any emotion or tension in the text is sacrificed by his inexplicable decision to frame roughly 90 per cent of the movie as tight close-ups on the face of whoever is speaking.
If it had worked, that would have been a daring aesthetic choice. But it doesn’t.
