It's Only the End of the World (2016)

I was in Toronto during the TIFF (international festival), Many promotional booths along King Street, in downtown Toronto where most of the movies are screened. I entered one booth I got to see the trailer of that movie (Got rewarded with a piece of Canadian cheddar for taking the 2 minutes to view the preview) . Because of the remarkable cast (Nathalie Baye, Vincent Cassel, Lea Seydoux, Marion Cotillard) , I decided to fork the $34 to have bragging rights for being part of the first screening. Complete waste of money. I still had high expectations at the beginning of the movie. The narrative seemed strange, Vincent Cassel looked like a bitter person. What you get in the first 5/10 minutes of the movie is what you get for the entire duration of the movie. Marion Cotillard who can not finish a sentence, Vincent Cassel a complete jerk, Lea Seydoux an hysterical millennial, Nathalie Baye as the matriarch and the only "normal" character. This movie is not going to make a killing at the box office.

Fmovies: I've just seen this in Cinema: it is a remarkable achievement, the humanity in this movie transcend the media form, and it does become pure art in many moments.

It's the first movie by Xavier Dolan that I've seen and it is directed extremely well. I loved all the subtle humour.

Vincent Cassel and Léa Seydoux impressed me the most out of the cast, but they all surpassed themselves.

My only negative about this movie is some of the techno-pop music choices, but it didn't ruin in any way the overall quality of the movie.

This movie deserves to be known internationally. I can already see it winning at the Awards for best foreign film. It would probably win best movie if it was American-made.

having been immensely impressed with Xavier Dolans's previous works, I took it for granted that I would like this movie. Never would have expected such an immense disappointment. At some point I was even wondering if someone had got it wrong and this wasn't his movie. Essentially: if you read the one-sentence sum up, you know the movie and there is nothing else to be learned or explored. In fact, without knowing the sum-up, I wouldn't even have known what's going on in this movie. The movie switches between random explosions of aggressiveness that don't make a lot of sense and endless "feels like 2 minutes" close-ups where the only movement is the blink of the actor's eye, all that accompanies by music that seems completely out of context. I hope Mr Dolan gets back on track to his previous brilliance with future works.

It's Only the End of the World fmovies. I think it's beautiful when creators explain more in shadows and silences than in dialogue and obvious visual cues. There is true brilliance to be found in the hidden and the unsaid; oftentimes, the truth comes in subtle ripples than in galvanized waves, and it's exceptional to come across true masters of the craft who are willing to respectfully handle such an intricate technique without becoming dull and overbearing.

Regrettably, such is not the case here.

Dolan tries to sweep us off our feet with anthropocentric framing and a flowing stream of ethereal brushings of color and emotion, something he does well, I can't deny him that. In the meanwhile though, he seems to be neglecting the actual plot which is painfully lacking on so many points, this movie is rendered into nothing more than a neophyte's attempt at a college- level, arthousy project.

Fortunate that the entirety of the cast is strong enough to redeem this effort by generously depositing spiritful performances, thankfully seeming to overcome the dire facts that the writing is listless, the plot is dormant, and the whole movie seems painfully mannered and conditional. So much so, that the viewer is bound to be left confused and, at times, attacked by the drip-fed, self-folding, monotonous interactions that ultimately serve to dress the movie with no pragmatic value at all.

In aiming for elegance and allure, Dolan fails to dish out a well-founded, coherent film, leaving us with nothing more than an unprogressive fable that tiptoes along the verge of deforming from 'suspended' to 'backwards'. And all very chaotically wrapped in out-of-place musical choices, not enhancing but rather debasing the scenes, pulling the viewer out of the experience in flabbergasted eye-rolls.

My point of view: Overlooking the feeble dialogue, overall repetitiveness, plot stagnancy and forced emotive filming techniques, I rather enjoyed the performances -- and here is where I rate this. It's Only The End of the World is a lifeless attempt, devoid of any true passion and it could have very easily broken down into oblivion the moment the end titles started rolling - if it weren't for Vincent Cassel's very last scene which, yet again, validates him as one of the Greats.

Lucky for me I will always have that to remember.

This movie is a misstep in the young director's career. It might be worth seeing just to see Dolan fall flat on his face with this pretentious, boring, meandering, nearly unwatchable "drama". I say it in quotes because every single moment of intensity is fabricated, there is no true drama in the movie, it's all just excuses so the characters can yell. Feels like Dolan sometimes asked his actors to improvise and forgot to cut out all the bad parts of their improv. All these close-ups are nauseating and completely useless. I don't feel close to these characters and filming them an inch away from their faces won't help it. It's a disappointing mess, and I can't believe Dolan considers it to be his best film. I'm truly afraid for The Death and Life of John F. Donovan, which I was looking forward to. Hope he will straighten his path, because this is a truly bad movie and I don't understand how this got to a 7.2 (fake votes maybe?)

I read Jean-Luc Lagarce's play "Juste la fin du monde" a while back and it didn't really make an impression on me. So I was quite intrigued and just a tiny bit worried when I learned that Xavier Dolan, possibly my favorite contemporary film director, was adapting this to me impenetrable text into a movie.

I had confidence in Dolan's genius and was rewarded beyond expectations. The film is as magnificent as anything Dolan has created before. He has said in interviews that at first reading Lagarce's language- also off-putting for me- didn't impress him but that he discovered its power on second random reading. I'm grateful he did and that he has now shared this discovery with his audience with the aid of some truly superb acting performances.

The very first scene establishes everything with narration by protagonist Louis (Gaspard Ulliel), a successful author who is flying to see his family for the first time in over a decade. Louis is dying. Dolan hides Ulliel's face with shadowy lightning and a cap as well as utilizes close-ups so extreme you can't get a proper feel of a face. The close focus continues in the following scenes of Louis's family, only to very gradually move away as the film progresses.

Greeting Louis are his extravagant mother Martine (Nathalie Baye), his coolly detached younger sister Suzanne (Léa Seydoux), his dominant yet socially awkward older brother Antoine (Vincent Cassel) as well as Antoine's shy, even more socially awkward wife Catherine (Marion Cotillard).

Dolan tends to depict extreme personal conflict in his work, uniting his fiercely dramatic, richly colored and always unique visuals with raw scripts that seem to channel Ingmar Bergman's best work. This also occurs in "Juste la fin du monde".

If you looked at the movie without sound you could mistake it for a regular- if exceptionally well shot and acted- drama about a family uniting with the result of old wounds and conflicts emerging and taking over the scenes. This is indeed what basically happens here, but the dialog, to me so difficult to digest from the pages of a book, makes it all about what is left unsaid. Because even as extreme emotion takes over the characters and bursts out they still can't communicate with each other. Lines that one would expect to convey full, sincere, angry honesty are expressed through awkward, even incomprehensible dialog that only hints at the apparently troubled history of these people.

Louis, as mellow and conciliatory as he acts, seems to be a dangerous catalyst for his family, an antigen they all defend their nest against. This is endlessly fascinating and sold so well by the actors, each and every one of them marvelous. The title becomes darkly ironic, as Louis soon seems to find his impending death a minor problem in his severely dysfunctional family. He connects with Catherine, another outsider and someone who he hasn't met before this one day during which the whole film occurs. "How much time?" Catherine asks Louis, a question that together with the offhand mention of Louis's first boyfriend having passed away from "cancer" establishes the fatal backdrop of the AIDS epidemic.

At first glance "Juste la fin du monde" might seem like a melodramatic shouting match that emerges unfocused and aimless, but I ultimately find it urgently compelling and even insightful through its sustained aversion to a genuine unmasking of characters.

Lagarce wrot