Matthias & Maxime

A group of former high school friends gathers at a French-Canadian country retreat to swim, get drunk and hit a few bongs. During the course of the evening Matthias (a lawyer) and Maxime (a bartender) are hoodwinked into locking lips on camera for an "expressionist" film project put together by the amusingly annoying younger sister of one of their group. Reluctantly they comply. The deed done and the weekend over, both return to the routine of their daily lives, but as autumn gives way to the first snow of winter, a chill has descended on their friendship.

What follows is an absorbing character-study of the two men; Matthias representing Order (professional at a city law firm, dating a woman named Sarah, and a stickler for the correct use of grammar) to Maxime's Chaos (single, scruffy and struggling to care for an addict mother.) Friends since childhood, they are presented almost as a long-term couple within the group. As Maxime prepares to leave Montreal for a new life in Australia it is in Matthias that we begin to see signs that something is amiss as his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. So what exactly is at the root of his unease? The kiss is a bit of a McGuffin, the hook which serves to throw light on the bigger issue of Maxime's going away, with clues pointing to its cause and effect.

Director Xavier Dolan (the endearingly shambolic Maxime) explores the relationship between the two protagonists by taking the unusual step of separating them for most of the film, which covers twelve days leading to Max's leaving party, but takes his time to embellish the slight drama with enough symbolism, visual cues and smokescreens to keep things interesting; a change of clothes before filming their smooch sees them switch colours (red to blue and vice versa); Matthias takes a night-time swim and fetches up exhausted on the wrong shore; Max gets drunk and watches as the birthmark spilling like blood from his eye vanishes in the mirror before him. Scenes are framed by windows, lenses, mirrors, hands, giving the sense of peering in on a slowly unfolding mystery. Mundane conversations, on second viewing, are imbued with connotation (note the opening line of dialogue).

This is not, then, a film full of vacuous men sitting around with their shirts off, clinking wine glasses in swimming pools or flailing around in scenes of a softcore nature. There are, instead, some terrific performances from all concerned, intertwined with wry humour, and the dynamics and interplay between the larger group of friends feels genuinely authentic.

If the film falters slightly it's that the ending is, alas, ambiguous (Dolan thinks it's clear where things are headed as the credits roll, but then he wrote it.) There is a cathartic moment between the two men late in proceedings not unlike Emma Thompson's famous snotting scene from Sense and Sensibility (and with a serious amount of added smoulder) but when the final piece of the jigsaw slots into place - during a phone call on Max's final day as he attends to a last-minute detail prior to his departure - the picture remains incomplete.

At its core, the film is a beautifully understated snapshot of two people separately going through the same moment in their lives and the shadow it throws over each of them, as those who know them look on in puzzlement, and holds up a mirror to something we are all sometimes guilty of; hiding our feelings so convincingly that we unwittingly become the architect of our own and others' misery.

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