Xavier Dolan is uniquely equipped to direct a music video. His feature films already share a sensibility with the form: that flair for style – that trademark extravagance, loved and loathed – could hardly be better suited for it. So now Dolan is here with Hello, a six-minute sepia epic under the aegis of Adele.
It only takes about 20 seconds for the 26-year-old auteur to announce his presence – with an extreme close-up of the English singer-songwriter, all oversized sunglasses and wind-tousled hair, looking suspiciously like Anne Dorval. If this were a proper Dolan film, a pop song would be about to fire up here. Naturally, one does. Has there ever been a better pairing of filmmaker and convention?
Dolan, of course, tends toward the ostentatious – to a sort of wholehearted flamboyance, much to the annoyance of his detractors. Unburdened by the demands of narrative fiction, then, you might expect the young director to double down on the panache, mounting a music-video spectacle as exorbitant as Columbia Records’ budget would allow. But actually Hello is quite restrained. Very handsomely shot, yes, even sumptuous – but not what you’d call showy. He hasn’t bothered with the aspect ratio change or the galvanic montage. Instead he’s kept to subtler tricks: probing dolly shots, sun-streaked vistas. This is Dolan working with the confidence that he no longer has anything to prove.
Ah, but Hello does retain a few familiar Dolanisms. People cry vigorously in close-up; there’s a slow-motion argument in a parking lot in the rain. The style is unmistakably his own. And again, his success here is not so surprising. The best thing in Mommy, and maybe the best thing Dolan has yet done, period, is the time-leaping daydream sequence in which Diane imagines a happier future for her troubled son – a self-contained tour de force that is, in essence, a kind of music video. Hello simply makes use of the same peerless skill set. This is the one undeniable advantage of being a filmmaker whose gifts are mainly formal: You can direct the hell out of things when that’s the only talent needed. Which makes this a small coup that even his most unpersuadable critics ought to grant him.