Seeing J'ai Tue Ma Mere last month has easily been one of the most comforting elements to this winter. Aside from the paralysis of brilliant it left me in on my long walk home from the screening and for days later, it also continues to come up in conversation and uniquely shield me.There has never been an adequate voice or tool of reason for my feelings toward my mother. I took great comfort in All About Love, a brilliant book by the brilliant bell hooks which talks a lot about parental "love" and how in this requisite transfer of "love" there are often tons of important values absent, such as respect and trust. I also found a lot of comfort in a This American Life episode, where folks discussed experiences of confronting (or at least toying with the idea of confronting) their parents about hurtful things they had done to them as kids. That to me is incredibly powerful.
But in J'ai Tue Ma Mere there is a poignant rawness that to me, really did justice those demonic feelings one can have for their parents--especially their mother. How a 16-year old kid can be so self-aware and so creative in communicating these feelings is beyond me, but he did those feelings justice. Similar to the contributions I list above, this film seems to attempt to re-imagine familial relationships. It seems to re-imagine how we negotiate these relationships we're expected to excel at and negotiates the absurdity that parental/child love is unconditional.
I also love how the film re-imagines the institution of family. Hubert (played by writer/director Xavier Dolan) finds family in his teacher, his partner, and his partner's mother. The values that bell hooks discusses in her book All About Love are found in Hubert's safe relationships with these people: trust, passion, understanding, respect. The sheer circumstance of him being his mother's son is not a circumstance where he finds these valuable forms of love.
Dolan's portrayal of the Hubert character is also incredibly responsible. He takes responsibility for the damage a teenager can do to their parent--particularly a single-parent. I similarly do not negate how difficult it is to be a parent: Dolan's character is disrespectful, unthankful and abusive, which is not okay. I suppose the brilliance of the film comes from this suggestion that in this simple idea of what parental/child love should involve is everything but simplicity. A 2-hour film can only begin to touch on the complexities of parental/child love but it can certainly illustrate just that: how complex that relationship can be.
The queering of the story is also important to acknowledge. Interestingly, despite his obvious queerness (his partner is introduced very early in the film), it's a layer of his experience unfolded with time. I really loved how he intersected his queerness in a way that acknowledged that it didn't exist in a vacuum, but also allowed it to develop and be discussed separately from the focus of his relationship with his mother. And strangely (as a queer), it was not his queerness that I wanted to hear about, it was his hate for his mother. I guess that speaks to the access I have to queer discourse and queer stories, but not to those of hating one's mother.
Photo taken from: http://festival-cannes.canalplus.fr/news/3-prix-pour-j-ai-tue-ma-mere
