Mommy · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Xavier Dolan's *Mommy* stakes its entire claim on a single compositional audacity: the 1:1 square frame, and what happens when it opens. That opening announces **mise-en-scène** as the film's true argument — Dolan and cinematographer André Turpin use the format to literalize confinement, pressing Die's brassy maternal love and Steve's explosive, ADHD-fuelled energy against the image's edges until the screen itself feels incarcerated. Yet the square also functions as an **affection-image** machine: deprived of lateral space, the camera has nowhere to go but inward, stacking faces in vertical close-up so that feeling — Anne Dorval's furious tenderness, Suzanne Clément's trembling witness — arrives before consequence, before action, before anything as manageable as plot. The Deleuzian close-up is supposed to suspend movement in pure expressivity, and that is precisely what the 1:1 ratio enforces: a cinema where emotion is not a vehicle for narrative but the thing itself. The formal gamble crystallizes in the 'Wonderwall' sequence, when the frame literally widens toward scope as Steve skates free and the three characters dare to inhabit an imagined future — the image expanding with the aspiration before snapping back when hope proves unsustainable, the frame itself collapsing on the characters like a verdict. Dolan is also, unmistakably, **the auteur** completing a circuit: the slow-motion music montage, the casting of Dorval as sacrificial mother, the operatic needle-drop — a grammar first roughed out in *I Killed My Mother* and here refined to its highest pitch, that earlier film's autobiographical rawness transposed into something reaching for Sirkian excess without a flicker of irony.