Appreciating and admiring an artist sometimes entails admitting that they too have their shortcomings, and not everything that they produce can be considered a masterpiece. This is unfortunately the case with Xavier Dolan, a filmmaker I hold a huge amount of reverence towards, with his films being some of the most extraordinary of the past decade, a few of them being personal favourites. However, there are a couple that are not nearly as effective as others, one of them being Matthias & Maxime, a film that is both his most recent and his most disappointing. It’s a weaker effort from a filmmaker that consistently pushed boundaries further than any of his contemporaries, failing to contain the same incredible nuance that defined his other work, and ultimately just being something of a bore, an uninspiring and prosaic attempt at recapturing the renegade spirit of his previous work, but without the earnest and electrifying brilliance that made Dolan the embodiment of the elusive wunderkind archetype, an individual whose artistic vision suggests a wisdom and talent that almost betrays their youthfulness, something that the director has been relatively successful in portraying over the past several years as he’s taken his place in the pantheon of incredible contemporary filmmakers. It’s difficult to situate Matthias & Maxime when it comes to looking at Dolan’s career as a whole, and while there is always a desire to find merit, this could be the first time the director has come close to an actual failure, even if he does constantly evade consolidating this idea through some audacious methods that may not improve the film, but help keep it afloat at the very least.

Unlike the film I previously considered to be his weakest (It’s Only the End of the World), the biggest problems with Matthias & Maxime was that it was the first time it seemed like Dolan was abandoning all the elements that made him such a promising director in the first place. There is a considerable lack of energy to this film, and as difficult as it is to admit, this was the first time I ever felt bored by one of his films. Considering nearly every one of his other films tend to draw the viewer in and hold us emotional hostage as it takes us through a series of harrowing but poignant moments in the lives of their characters, Matthias & Maxime inspires nothing but a wandering mind, with nearly every minute of its two-hour running time coming like a missed opportunity, not to mention feeling longer than nearly anything Dolan had done prior to this. Matthias & Maxime moves at a glacial pace, and not in a way that is interesting – it becomes a bit of a chore, each scene extended beyond reason, eroding nearly all the potential that was very much lurking beneath the surface of the film. It becomes a bit of a challenge to fully embrace this film, which doesn’t even strike us as being all that interesting, whether in theory or practice. This is only made worse by the fact that, while he could be quite heavy-handed in some of his narrative techniques, Dolan rarely allowed his films to be dull, always making sure there was something of value, even if it was as inconsequential as a musical cue or line of dialogue. Matthias & Maxime lacks most of these components, and becomes far too invested in its own supposed brilliance to actually step back and realize the genuine pathos needed for a story centred on self-loathing and crises of identity, which should be themes that Dolan could easily capture.

The issues with Matthias & Maxime can most notably be traced back to the story – there’s something quite profoundly unsettling about how Dolan tackles this story. Never one to shy away from frank and explicit explorations of identity and sexuality (especially in a country as progressive as Canada), Dolan has made some incredible statements on the importance of staying true to oneself – but yet, it almost seems as if he is regressing with this film, with some of the character motivations being the antithesis of the well-formed, provocative glimpses into the lives of those who don’t adhere to the status quo. The problem isn’t with the story itself – there’s a lot of promise in the dynamic between two men who begin to question their sexuality after an unfortunate incident rekindles dormant feelings in both of them. Rather, we find that Matthias & Maxime struggles to build a particularly strong arc for any of its characters, each one of them being either too aloof in their internalized quandaries for us to feel like we can connect with them, or grating in a way that erodes all semblance of reality. Dolan and Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas, as the titular characters, are both good – but the rest of the cast struggles with these characters, with even one of the director’s muses, the incredible Anne Dorval, being relegated to a hysterical and unrealistic caricature, existing purely to complicate the main character’s life, rather than actually helping the story along. Even if the narrative was weaker, we could’ve expected the performances to at least be solid, but there’s nothing particularly compelling about either the story or the people who populate it, which is an enormous blow to any chances this film had of being a success.

Another problem with Matthias & Maxime is that it is emotionally inconsistent – somehow, Dolan has made a film that is both hysterical and far too tempered, with the inability to measure the emotional content needed for a particular scene, as well as the effort to put it into practice, causing the film to feel extremely uneven. Dolan appreciates melodrama, being the closest the millennial generation has to Douglas Sirk in terms of a filmmaker whose work fully embodies the elegant and profane – but Matthias & Maxime lets the director down in the area that he was most confident in. Two of the director’s key themes – family and romance – are almost entirely missing from this film in terms of actually making an impact. There is a considerable lack of enthusiasm when it comes to representing the familial aspects of the story (with the aforementioned fiasco that was Dorval’s performance being one of the weakest aspects of the film, which is not something I ever expected to write about a Dolan film), and the romantic sub-plot feels forced and insincere, taking far too long to reach coherency, by which point we have already become emotionally distant from this film. More than anything else, Matthias & Maxime is just incredibly boring, being a series of meandering conversations that don’t carry much weight, and just serve to further distract from the shortcomings embedded deep within the film, which are not serviced at all by the scattershot execution that feels almost entirely inappropriate considering the very serious themes that Dolan is attempting to investigate, to very little avail.

When each of the director’s previous works share the same feeling of drawing the viewer in and enrapturing us with its meaningful, complex approach to the human condition, it’s easy to understand why a film like Matthias & Maxime would be disappointing. This is not Dolan working at his peak, and the fact that this is the most recent film from a director who rarely stopped working (sometimes producing a film a year in the latter part of the previous decade) proves that there was some level of artistic exhaustion taking place through the production. We can feel that the director was not working under the most optimal conceptual circumstances, the film feeling like a series of bungled attempts at insightful commentary, lacking the heartfelt honesty and gentle humour that was a component of his best work. It just doesn’t feel like his heart and soul went into the creation of this film, with the more appropriate explanation being that Matthias & Maxime is cobbled together from themes and pieces of dialogue excised from the director’s previous work, since it resembles them in terms of the themes that he is exploring, but lacks even the smallest iota of effort in terms of being a fully-formed narrative with a clear message. We have to work through far too many meaningless conversations to find even the slimmest thread of nuance, and such effort is futile, since the final product is not nearly as worthwhile as the work it took to get there. As a whole, Matthias & Maxime is a film that really just represents the director not necessarily at his worst, but rather at his most tired – so perhaps the hiatus he has taken is actually a good idea, since one can only hope that when he does return with his next film, it is the product of a re-energized auteur, rather than one that seemed to have only made this film for the sake of keeping busy, rather than containing any real artistic merit.