Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Mommy
2014 · Xavier Dolan · Mommy on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Look at the edges of the picture, not only the faces. (camera)
Turpin shoots in a 1:1 square. There is no room to either side, so two people cannot share a normal wide shot and faces stack vertically or get pressed against the border. The width of the image changes during the film. Watch when.
Payoff: The shape of the screen is a character here, and how much room it gives a person is the film's running measurement. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). The square is what the reading calls the closed set, a frame that holds people in place instead of opening a window on them.
Count the doorways and windows Dolan shoots his characters through. (staging)
Inside an already narrow frame he adds more frames. Hallways, door jambs, window panes, the gap between two bodies. Die and Steve are constantly boxed twice over in a cluttered suburban house.
Payoff: Enclosure is built into the staging, so you feel the house closing before anyone in it raises a voice.
Listen for pop songs these characters would actually own. (sound)
Oasis, Dido, Celine Dion, Counting Crows, Lana Del Rey. Dolan uses unfashionable mainstream tracks straight, with no irony on top. Scenes stretch out inside them and the film slows down to let a song carry the feeling.
Payoff: The music is what the characters cannot say, picked from the radio they live with rather than from a curator's shelf.
Watch how fast Pilon's face turns from grinning to furious. (performance)
Steve holds charm and threat in the same expression and switches between them with no warning beat. Dorval answers with a mother who is loud, profane and tender in one breath. Both actors work in long unbroken takes.
Payoff: The film refuses to separate the boy who is lovable from the boy who is dangerous, which is exactly Die's problem.
Look at how blown out the daylight is outside the house. (light)
Turpin pushes a warm, slightly overexposed palette. Sun comes in hot on skin and clothes, so the image reads as a bright summer memory and as something harsh at the same time. Interiors stay cluttered and dim by comparison.
Payoff: The light keeps promising an easy summer while the square keeps refusing to let anyone into it.
Once you have seen it
Watch the exact moment the black borders start to move. (camera)
Steve's hands find the edges of the image on that skateboard and shove them apart. Later the picture narrows again on its own. Dolan uses the width of the frame as a dial for how much future these people can picture.
Payoff: Freedom is rendered as an aspect ratio, and the contraction back is a verdict delivered without a word of dialogue. In the reading: the Open. A closed frame giving way to something larger is what the reading calls the Open, and Dolan makes it an event you can see.
Watch the widescreen montage of a graduation and a wedding. (structure)
Dolan spends the film teaching you to trust his slow-motion, song-driven reveries. Then he runs one that belongs to nobody's life. The cut out of it lands hard because the grammar had been honest until that point.
Payoff: The sequence bends time toward what Die needs instead of what happened, and the return to the square costs her the whole imagined future. In the reading: dream-image (onirosign). A wish unhooked from any real memory is what the reading calls the dream-image, and here it arrives in the film's own montage language.
Listen to how long Kyla takes to finish a sentence. (performance)
Clément plays a woman whose stutter the film stages with patience instead of pity. Whole scenes wait on her. When she does break through, in speech or in physically stopping Steve, the release is startling because the film never rushed her.
Payoff: Her held-back voice is the third force in the house, and it is what briefly makes two people into a family of three.
Carry this in: Watch the edges of the picture. The film is an argument about how much room a person is allowed.