Mommy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Halfway through Mommy, a boy on a skateboard reaches up and shoves the world apart. Steve has been rolling down a sunlit street to Oasis's "Wonderwall," and the image — square, boxed, black to either side — has held him the way it has held everyone in the film so far. Then his hands find the edges and push. The picture breathes out into widescreen. It's one of the few effects in cinema that needs no explaining and survives any number of rewatches; you feel it in your chest a beat before you understand it. Xavier Dolan was twenty-five when he made this, and he had just turned the shape of the screen into a character.

Deleuze gives us a vocabulary for why it lands, and Mommy is nearly a teaching machine for it. Start with what he calls the closed set, the cadre — the frame not as a neutral window but as a system, a cell that holds information and holds people in place. Dolan's 1:1 ratio makes that idea physical. The square strips away the lateral air in which ordinary shot-reverse-shot breathes; faces get pressed to the edges, stacked vertically, jammed into doorways and hallways that the staging uses as frames inside the frame. The form isn't decoration. It's Steve's confinement and his mother Die's entrapment, built into the geometry of every shot. When the camera stays tight and handheld on Dorval's or Pilon's faces, you get what Deleuze calls the affection-image — and more precisely the qualisign, a face held close enough that a single quality (tenderness, dread, the flicker before violence) registers on it without yet discharging into any action. The square gives you nowhere to look but there.

But Deleuze insists the closed set is never only closed. Every frame trembles toward what he names the Open: the sense that this boxed-in piece belongs to a larger whole that's changing, that something always exceeds the edges. Most films leave the Open implied — a glance off-screen, a sound from the next room. Dolan does the audacious thing and makes it an event. Steve's hands on the borders are the closed set opening onto the Open, and freedom gets rendered, impossibly, as an aspect ratio. This is the invention the film will be remembered for: not a metaphor laid over the story but the formal apparatus itself made to feel. Watch what happens later, when the frame contracts back to the square as hope collapses. The screen's width becomes the exact measure of the characters' horizon — how much future they're allowed to imagine.

That collapse matters because Mommy sits squarely on the hinge Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image. In the older cinema, a character perceives a situation and acts to change it; action resolves things. Die can't. The whole tragedy is that loving Steve is not the same as being able to hold him — perception and tenderness pour in, and no adequate action comes out the other side. The film even hands her a terrible action (the alternate-Canada law that lets a parent commit a child without a judge) and stages it not as a solution but as a defeat. Meanwhile Steve runs on something more archaic, what Deleuze calls the impulse-image: pure appetite and compulsion erupting beneath the social surface, charm and menace inseparable, riding a line of slope that bends only one way — toward the institution, toward the final leap. He doesn't act on situations. He detonates inside them.

So where does the widescreen go when it can't be earned in life? Into fantasy. The film's most devastating passage is Die's montage of a future for Steve — graduation, a wedding — which blooms into widescreen and is then revealed as pure projection. This is the dream-image, the onirosign: a circuit of wish unhooked from any real memory, time bent toward what one needs rather than what is. The cut back to the square reality is the cruelest edit in the film precisely because Dolan has trained us, with his own pop-montage grammar, to trust those swelling, slow-motion reveries. He spends the movie absorbing his characters into songs they would actually love — the world moving while they hold still inside it — and then he uses that trust to break us.

None of this arrives from nowhere. The slow-motion walk set to a needle-drop is Dolan's own idiom, carried over from Heartbeats; the mother-son war and the casting of Anne Dorval come straight from his debut I Killed My Mother, restaged and tightened into a three-hander. Behind him stands Wong Kar-wai's magpie use of pop as emotional anchor, and behind that the unembarrassed maternal melodrama of Sirk and Stella Dallas — the weepie built on a mother surrendering a child for the child's own good. Dolan's gift was to revive that operatic feeling without the protective irony arthouse cinema usually demands, and to fuse it to a formal idea no one had literalized before.

What did it do to film? It proved the frame is not a given. Aspect ratio, the most taken-for-granted parameter in cinema, became in Dolan's hands a dramatic organ — something a character can push against, something that can close on you like a verdict. Next time, don't only watch the faces. Watch the edges. The whole film is an argument about how much room a person is allowed.