him and him, Reivew on Matthias & Maxime

He met him.

One is called Matthias and the other is called Maxim. They are a pair of good friends, and more than just good friends. Because one day...

They kissed.

This is a starting point for the story of Xavier Dolan's film "Mathias and Maxim." After that kiss, the two began to play tacitly, but it made their relationship even more tense, awkward, and stiff and overwhelmed.

All of this may be thanks to that movie, who let them take part in it, who knows that there is even a kiss scene.

But it's not a bad thing. This is a good time for the two to open their hearts. As the French novelist Zola said: A kiss is a secret that is told to the mouth instead of to the ear.

The secret between two men is like an invisible wall. They are powerless and have no courage to break it. Dolan is very good at and extremely accurate at capturing this feeling: a highly saturated sense of suffocation, constantly flipping in the air, and then slowly diluted. The thoughts between each other are long and long, but they still have to greet each other with a smile, their eyes flow, and the inadvertent silence is fleeting.

The surrounding joy made this feeling ferment slowly and silently. Just like the blood on Maxim's forehead inexplicably flowing, just like Mathias swimming in the water in a loss. The feeling is mysterious, sensitive, romantic, subtle. It aims to convey to the audience an inherent anxiety: a dangerous relationship is bound to occur between Matthias and Maxim.

Maxim is distressed in the film. Physically, he is a "blemished" person with a birthmark on his face; psychologically, he has a mother who has a headache, and the classic tear of "I Killed My Mother" is reproduced between mother and son. forced scene.

Most of Maxim seems to be alone, he's always biting his fingers at friend gatherings, he's longing for love, he's longing for the future, and he's betting his life on Australia: he's about to leave for Melbourne.

At the same time, he also needs a letter of introduction.

Matthias' father would write a letter of introduction for Maxime. The letter has already been written and handed to Matthias, but Marty has not handed it over to Mark, because he knows that once the letter is handed over, the day of parting will come, so it is better to delay it for a few days. sky.

When creating the mood between the two, Dolan seems to have a lot of experience. He will not give the two opportunities to confront each other many times, but will show their lives separately. Use local details to condense each other's emotions, such as the potted plant in the office, which Marty watched for a long time before, and then it was moved away, leaving dispensable traces. What does this represent? We can say that this potted plant is Maxim, Mark is gone, and Marty misses him very much; we can also say that this potted plant is a memory between the two, the best time, but now it is different.

Think of the picture that appeared in the back of the movie: the two once painted a farm called "Mathias and Maxim" when they were 7 years old. Perhaps the potted plant reminded him of the farm he dreamed of as a child.

Both have a "farm complex", and both have unhappy lives that people can't help themselves. Their bodies are far apart, but their hearts have been clinging to each other. They are the kind of people whose secrets will be known to us offscreen that stormy night.

Watching two men making out through the window outside the storm is romantic and sad. They end up just kissing and caressing. They are still good friends. They were more in line with what Dolan had in mind: friendship is love without sex.

So you'll find that friendship takes up more space than homosexuality. The whole film uses too many tireless short shots to focus on the happy time between friends, chatting, joking and playing games, and their energy is exhausted. They seemed to be doing nothing, like clouds in the sky, floating in the air all day long.

They are in such a state: restless. The air of youth surrounds them, filling too much boredom and emptiness. They revolve around Matthias and Maxim, and the director aims to create a constant balance between the joy of their friendship on one side and the lives of the protagonists on the other.

The most rare thing is that the emotional relationship between these friends feels so reasonable, real and natural. Their vigor, their wantonness, their infinite vitality, they are like a group of big children, disturbing this unsatisfactory world.

It's more of a movie about what friendship is than it's a same-sex movie. Dolan impatiently shows the friendship between men, in fact, is telling the audience: hey! Friendship is a beautiful thing!

Think about the boys in the film, they don't seem to grow up, they are inevitably entangled, confused, affectionate, and childish, but what a group of sincere, lovely and interesting people they are!

So I had already guessed what the ending would look like. I just knew that on the day Maxim was about to leave, his good friend would definitely wait for him at the door, looking like he was stuck in his pocket, with a smile in his eyes.

He parted with him.

One is called Matthias and the other is called Maxim.

They will be lifelong best friends.