French-Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan has built a shockingly prolific career out of twisting tightly wound melodramas into achingly erotic, queer-coded melancholia that often toy with the tools of mysterious secrets. Eking tortured emotional resonance from the failings of fractured families, his canon generally positions trouble with 'mommy dearest' at the root of all that ails his haunted protagonists.
These dramatically enticing traits are at play in Dolan’s dreamily disturbed debut work for television, the five-part miniseries (La Nuit où Laurier Gaudreault s’est Réveillé), which is sure to draw him further comparisons to the late, great, similarly bountiful, boundary-pushing and medium-hopping German auteur .
Who, exactly, Logan is and what happened when he woke up is nominally central to what went down on an explosive night in 1991 that blew apart the already tightly-wound Larouche family, but mostly he’s a . The aftermath of these rain-lashed flashbacks is what we’re really here for, as the estranged Larouche siblings gather around the deathbed of ailing matriarch Madeleine (‘Maddy’) almost 30 years later.
Chantal (Magalie Lépine Blondeau), Denis (Éric Bruneau), Maddy (Anne Dorval) and Elliot (Xavier Dolan). Source: Distributor
This scandal-frustrated mayoral candidate is depicted in both timeframes by the monumental Anne Dorval. She memorably entered the Dolan-verse in his big screen debut I Killed My Mother, portraying the put-upon Chantale in a semi-autobiographical wrangling with the filmmaker’s messed-up mother complex. Chantale, trying her best, had to suck up, “When I try to imagine the worst mother in the world, I can’t do better than you,” from her bratty son Hubert (Dolan), thereby setting the tone of his OTT oeuvre to come.
Something of a muse, Dorval, who returned in Sydney Film Festival champion Heartbeats and towered over Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize-winner Mommy, has essentially taken turns with Nathalie Baye, central to Dolan films including the Cannes Queer Palm-securing Laurence Anyways and César-winner It’s Only the End of the World, in Dolan’s often monstrously exaggerated maternal roles.
Chantal (Magalie Lépine Blondeau). Source: Distributor
In The Night Logan Woke Up, we first meet Dorval’s Maddy as a glassy-eyed ghost with one foot out the mortal door in a claustrophobically floral wallpapered bedroom that has a whiff of Miss Havisham about it; a far cry from her glamorous ‘90s look. Ever ready to leap in front of the camera while directing, Dolan depicts her troubled youngest son Elliot, temporarily released from rehab just in time to catch her last breath. There’s a painfully beautiful visual call-back to the opening glance through fingers of It’s Only the End of the World in their goodbye.
Simmering violence bubbles beneath Elliot’s strained relationship with piercing-eyed eldest brother and recovered addict Julien (an angularly unnerving Patrick Hivon). He’s in a complicated, physically distant marriage to Chantal (a consistently scene-stealing Magalie Lépine Blondeau, who also pops up in Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways). Julien turns instead to sex workers and jumps at startling shadows of a menacing hooded figure from that fateful night in the ‘90s. A leather-clad biker is stalking Julien’s home in the present.
Elliot feels safest with his handsomely scruffy divorcée middle brother Denis (Éric Bruneau), who on the surface seems to have things more or less together, but whose home is a literal mess. And then there’s Mireille (a mesmerising Julie Le Breton), who sweeps back into their lives after going AWOL shortly after whatever went down back in the day. She’s summoned by Maddy from beyond the grave by a will-bound request that the professional embalmer preserve her mortal remains.
Mireille (Julie Le Breton). Source: Distributor
All standard-issue for Dolan. His will likely know that this is the sometime enfant terrible’s second go at adapting a fraught family drama by French-Canadian playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, following the bracingly homoerotic . That tenterhooks chamber piece saw Dolan play a grieving boyfriend who rocks up for his closeted lover’s funeral and winds up in an electrically ambiguous dance with his aggro brother (Pierre-Yves Cardinal, who briefly appears in Mommy). It was nominated for the Golden Lion at The Venice Film Festival and rightfully picked up the FIPRESCI Prize.
While Dolan’s character isn’t explicitly queer in The Night Logan Woke Up, the show’s opening moments feature the shocking sight of an unknown man bound, semi-naked, to a burning pride flag. As foreshadowing goes, it’s out there. Concealed personality traits are inherent in Dolan’s work, with the othering sensibility inhabiting all his protagonists.
He’s a filmmaker interested in the outsider, those who transgress social boundaries, the often painful consequences of stigma and shame, and the explosive release of lust. , “As a young gay man, you do have to try to fit in, and then you understand that there are other people trying to fit in, trying to define themselves in the eyes of others… All my movies have been a cry for help, a cry for acceptance of difference.”
Elliot (Xavier Dolan). Source: Distributor
The Night Logan Woke Up is no different, teasing out its long-buried answers and the physical and psychological scars they’ve wrought. What is the terrible secret held tightly between Julien and Mireille, one so dark it drove her away and their mother against her children? The specifics do not matter. Just lean into the shattered echoes impaling the Larouche souls.
With Dolan, it’s all about the vibe, aided here by Hans Zimmerman’s surprisingly restrained score and bolstered by a soundtrack including Canadian crooner Rufus Wainwright plus the indie rock operatics of Australian band The Jezabels. By the time the percussive rat-a-tat of James Blake’s Joy Division cover ‘Atmosphere’ sweeps us into the suitably wrenching finale, you’ll likely have been up all night bingeing Dolan’s messed-up brilliance. Naturellement.
is now streaming at SBS On Demand.
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