In the gripping black comedy/melodrama Tom at the Farm (opening Friday), a young man is grieving his late lover, Guillaume. He turns up at the dead boy's rural Quebec funeral with a phony blonde hairdo, promising to deliver a eulogy that will make the conservative townsfolk sit up and take notice �" i.e., respect the often-closeted but plucky queer citizens in their midst. Sadly, Tom loses his nerve and instead sits through a perfunctory service performed by the parish priest, thus disappointing his late beau's mom Agathe (Lise Roy) and, more ominously, Francis, the deceased man's moody and possibly dangerous brother (Pierre-Yves Cardinal). Quebec prodigy queer filmmaker Xavier Dolan takes us along the devious path to salvation for Tom (Dolan himself, continuing a longstanding tradition of playing his slippery gay-boy heroes), and just maybe opens up a portal for a more imaginative and risky kind of LGBTQ movie.
In the half-dozen years since his feature-length directorial debut, Dolan, who stands taller onscreen than his five-foot, seven inches, has dazzled art-house crowds from Montreal to Cannes. In the manner of would-be geniuses everywhere, Dolan has shown himself capable of stealing from the best of his predecessors. In 2009's I Killed My Mother, Dolan's Hubert crassly tells his teacher that his mom has passed, mimicking Jean Pierre Leaud's dodgy schoolboy in Francois Truffaut's French New Wave The 400 Blows. Called out by a Hollywood Reporter critic for giving himself a number of pensive close-ups, "exploring [his own] face with swooning intoxication," Dolan, sassy in real life, replied, "You can kiss my narcissistic ass." Such cheeky attitude is hard to maintain unless you deliver the goods, and so far the now-26-year-old director/writer has done so in spades.
Tom at the Farm (Tom a la ferme), adapted from Michel Marc Bouchard's stage play (by Bouchard and Dolan), gives American audiences a seldom-seen glimpse of a rural Quebec that is simultaneously gorgeous and forbidding. Compared by some to Hitchcock at the top of his game, Tom at the Farm is faithful to certain age-old dilemmas for queer folk, or as co-writer Bouchard puts it in the film's press notes, "Before learning how to love, homosexuals learn how to lie."
Dolan deftly plays a "hero" who is no golden-haired role model. This Tom lies, connives, schemes and waffles. While assuming much of his tale's less-flattering moral baggage, Dolan generously creates some juicy turns for his expressive supporting cast. With a starkly white mane and a stutterstep delivery that proclaims a good woman at the end of her mental tether, Lise Roy turns Agathe into a comic foil who can enliven a dark scene between Tom and Francis by declaring, "I've baked an apple pie. Come to the kitchen before it turns cold."
The chilling scene that will tell you whether this Quebec pie is for you comes late in the second act, when Tom plunks himself down on a local barstool and orders up from a portly middle-aged bartender who proves to be no minor character as he serves Tom a large pint of ale.
"I came for the funeral, and now I'm helping out at the Longchamp farm."
"I hope you came alone. Cause Big Guy ain't welcome here. Francis is banned."
"Why's Francis banned?"
"It happened here nine years ago. I remember because we were celebrating the bar's ninth anniversary, and we were drunk as skunks!"
The bartender's tale is not for the squeamish, but does serve to ground the film's dark underbelly in a way that is both shocking yet sadly plausible.
This film will appeal to former farm boys and girls, and more particularly to fans of Belgium director Michale R. Roskam's 2011 farm drama Bullhead, where a boyhood tragedy comes back to haunt a bevy of adults.
Dolan is already at work on his first English-language film, The Life and Death of John F. Donovan. Tom at the Farm should expand the wickedly funny Quebecois filmmaker's fan base. Some may even delight in its similarities to fellow Quebec director Denis Villeneuve's starkly violent and seductively sadistic 2013 drama Prisoners, with vivid performances from Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano and Melissa Leo. As Tom gloriously illustrates, not everyone has what it takes to survive a quiet life in the country.