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ABSTRACT
Several critics have described Xavier Dolan as a gifted yet self-indulgent filmmaker. From the stylish costume design to the carefully composed arrangement of colors and objects within the mise en scène, Dolan’s films would seem to be guilty of an over-investment in the image. This essay interrogates the aesthetic and affective possibilities that the ostensibly intolerable textuality of Dolan’s films allows by focusing on their distinctive deployment of the musical parenthesis. What may one gain by indulging in the pleasures of the parenthetical mode? The expectation according to which such pleasures should be dispensed with moderation betrays suspicion towards a filmic mode of stylistic and emotional excess that oversteps certain boundaries and, in so doing, undermines hierarchies of value and taste. This essay questions the authoritative appeal of these hierarchies, arguing that there may be something valuable – and queer – about their displacement.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Julien Gester writes that ‘Dolan is uncontained, uninhibited by superego’. Gester (Citation2019).
2. See for example Rooney (Citation2013).
3. See for example Gonzalez (Citation2010).
4. On melodrama as a way of viewing the world, see Williams (Citation2018).
5. On the Berlin techno club Berghain, see Bell (Citation2018).
6. See also San Filippo (Citation2010).
7. For a discussion of the dialectic between spectacle and narrative in the Hollywood musical comedy, see Mellencamp (Citation1991).
8. I would like to thank Mayra Bottaro for turning my attention to Genette’s notion of metalepsis.
9. Bradshaw’s choice of the term ‘unrewarding’ should not go unnoticed, as it clearly betrays bias towards that ‘excess’ that does not serve a logic of textual utility.
10. See Rees-Roberts (Citation2019, 214). In 2015, Dolan directed the music video of Adele’s hit single ‘Hello’, while Dolan’s collaboration with Indochine resulted in the 2013 release of the music video for ‘College Boy’.
11. One may also take this kind of textuality as symptomatic of what Steven Shapiro has described as the post-cinematic media ecology of the 21st century and its accompanying digital innovations. Shapiro (Citation2010).
12. At Cannes, Mommy won the 2014 Jury Prize, while in 2016 It’s Only the End of the World/Juste la fin du monde (2016) was awarded the Grand Prix.
13. For an extended analysis of Dolan’s use of melodrama, see Pidduck (Citation2019, 52–79).
14. It was Judith Butler who most famously recognized the radical utopianism of these subcultural practices: Butler (Citation1992).
15. See for example Pond (Citation2019); Knight (Citation2019).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sergio Rigoletto
Sergio Rigoletto is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He is the author of Masculinity and Italian Cinema: Sexual Politics, Social Conflict and Male Crisis in the 1970s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) and Le norme traviate (Milan: Meltemi, 2020). He is the co-editor of Popular Italian Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). His article “Universality, Spectrality and Difference in Call Me by Your Name” has just been published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.