It's Only the End of the World

2016 "It would have been a lovely family dinner. If it weren’t the last."
6.8| 1h38m| NA| en| More Info
Released: 26 August 2016 Released
Producted By: France 2 Cinéma
Country: France
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website: http://curzonartificialeye.com/its-only-the-end-of-the-world
Info

Louis, a terminally ill writer, returns home after a long absence to tell his family that he is dying.

Genre

Drama

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Director

Xavier Dolan

Production Companies

France 2 Cinéma

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It's Only the End of the World Audience Reviews

Raetsonwe Redundant and unnecessary.
LouHomey From my favorite movies..
Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.
Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
Mikael Kuoppala 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 wrote the original play in 1990, reportedly to examine his own mortality. He was dying himself at that time and finally succumbed to AIDS in 1994. There is a touching dimension to the script's nightmarish reunion as we sense Louis's need to come full circle, to rediscover his childhood and adolescence, even to assure himself that his already estranged family can survive after he's gone. Death is ever present, and instead of trivializing the personal conflicts it elevates them, because they are if nothing else moments of vitality for people not truly living.
davidbasic I think that we were all afraid a bit about Dolan and his work in the future. First movies that Xavier directed were all about LGBT and their attempt to survive in difficulty called social life. After I've seen this movie I am sure that Dolan will be one of the greatest directors this world has ever had. He tears your heart, than makes you smile, but after all you don't know if you should vomit or spit in your reflection in the mirror."It's only the end of the world" is a wonderfully directed and theatrically explained way of interpersonal misunderstanding. I can't help saying that I am overwhelmed by his work in total, but this is really something very special, very sour and full of truth.
lucananas_ I remained completely unsatisfied by quitting the movie theater because, first, what we all except never come, the "emotionnal scene" didn't move me at all, Gaspard Ulliel and Marion Cotillard's characters are so annoying (they can even talk without hesitate, being mistaken, say sorry) and in brief, all the dialogues lead nowhere, they all can't communicate and it's so exasperating! However I was pleasantly surprised by Nathalie Baye who I loved and Léa Seydoux.Well, I understood what Xavier Dolan wanted to show but I didn't like it, and by the way this is an adaptation, so I guess I wouldn't like the book as well.
lasttimeisaw Canne's 2016 Grand Prize of the Jury winner, Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan's sixth feature, IT'S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD is based on Jean-Luc Lagarce's semi-autobiographical theatrical piece, and its closest reference within Dolan's canon is TOM AT THE FARM (2013), adapted from Michel Marc Bouchard's play, a throbbing drama predominately enclosed within a single household. And this time, Dolan goes even further, not only the story is almost exclusively locked inside a family house with five characters, the time-frame is also condensed just within a few hours (bar some sketchy flashback). In the opening monologue, inside a plane, Louise (Ulliel), a 34-year-old writer, confesses his impending death (from an unspecified disease), and the destination of his trip, to visit his family which he has left 12 years old for the first time. At first, it seems Dolan expunges any signifiers of digital technology to avoid signposting a specific time for the story, it could happen well in early 90s when Lagarce wrote the play, or in current days, but when DRAGOSTEA DIN TEI merrily pops up, the effort dissipates immediately, yet, a more relevant distinction is the once-tabooed homosexuality has taken a back seat in the narrative (dissimilar to TOM AT THE FARM), instead, Dolan archly toys with his opening gambit: Louis is going to drop the bomb onto his kin, and god knows how they will react?In the ensuing over-deliberate familial wrangle, this tantalizing question which is blatantly deployed as a trigger of viewers' curiosity, has ultimately evaded the drama, what Dolan musters is a series of bromide-suffusing tête-à-têtes between Louis and his mother Martine (Baye), younger sister Suzanne (Seydoux), elder brother Antoine (Cassel) and Catherine (Cotillard), Antoine's wife, the sister-in-law he has never met hitherto, and at other time, a cacophony of the usual suspects generates on its own, meanwhile Louis remains excruciatingly tight-lipped through and through. A gaunt-looking Gaspard Ulliel gives a commendable performance, straitjacketed in his diction, the character is solely built on affective miens and minute gestures which demands taxing physical effort to pad out the lacunae in Dolan's meditative close-ups (Dolan really loves Ulliel's model- contour and blues-imbued visage) and what's more incredible is Ulliel instills a visceral pang of agony into Louis' perturbed psyche in the face of a massively elliptical story-line. Vincent Cassel, as ever so rebarbative in beastly aggro, gets an about-face display of bravura in the blistering altercation consummated near the finish-line, don't judge the book by its cover, never, his Antoine is another victim in the aftermath. Léa Seydoux and Nathalie Baye, both send up impressive theatrics of trivial verbosity and rapier-like acrimony to an exuberant extent. Which leaves Marion Cotillard's Catherine, being the only outsider in their bloodline, engages with a more discombobulated outlook in her timorous muttering and courteous self-consciousness, which is not a big stretch for the Oscar-winner, maybe that's why Dolan compensates with overlong glamour gaze into Catherine's dew-eyed comeliness (why will she marry a brute like Antoine, one cannot help wondering?), playing out tacitly with Louis' soulful kindness. We have only been granted sporadic glances into Louis' past in between (in the form of Dolan's emblematic slo-motion, moist and smoky grandeur), there is no buried secrets to be disinterred, no irreconcilable feud running in consanguinity, we have no idea neither what pushed Louis away from home years ago nor what has been keeping him from divulging his tidings now, yes, human emotions are sophisticated, but they are inherently follows certain logical pattern no matter who flimsy it could be, if it is Dolan's intention to obfuscate and equivocate and leave us to pattern the jigsaw, he has done a splendid job. Opening with Camille's poignant HOME IS WHERE IT HURTS and rounding off with Moby's nostalgia-infused NATURAL BLUES, Dolan's latest offering is a tad shambolic in bootstrapping its central drama and overindulges in its artistic license which is dwarfed in front of TOM AT THE FARM or MOMMY (2014), but on the other hand, it doesn't veers into narcissism and smugness as unbearable as in HEARTBEATS (2010), a middle-road residing might not be a bad thing to cool down Dolan's hyped auteur-status, so we might be more poised for another incandescence along the line, inevitably.