French-Canadian director Xavier Dolan – best known for I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats, Mommy and Tom at the Farm – has announced that he is retiring from film.
Dolan first publicly contemplated the idea of quitting cinema last year, saying that he wanted to spend more time with his friends and family. But in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Pais this week, he confirmed this decision. “I don’t feel like committing two years to a project that barely anyone sees,” he said. “I put too much passion into it to have these disappointments. It makes me wonder if my filmmaking is bad, and I know it's not.”
Part of the problem, Dolan suggested, is how volatile the world has become, and the threat of a “civil war” caused by intolerance. At a time when “everything around us is falling apart,” he says he doesn’t see the point in telling stories. “Art is useless and dedicating oneself to the cinema, a waste of time,” he said.
While he remains a beloved cult director, Dolan’s career has hit a rocky patch in the last half-decade. 2016’s It’s Only the End of the World won the Grand Prix at Cannes, but was met with wildly polarised reviews. The Life & Death of John F Donovan, released in 2018, was widely panned. His latest, Matthias & Maxim (2019) fared a little better, but it was hardly a critical triumph.
Still, Dolan’s contribution to queer cinema cannot be understated: films like Heartbearts, Mommy and are already firmly part of the canon. It’s a sad testament to the challenges facing independent filmmakers today that a director of such evident talent has felt the need to abandon his craft.