This is a review of Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013)
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10 April (updated 13 April)
This is a review of Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) (2013)
If Xavier Dolan had put all the care and effort of his directing, adapting and acting in Tom at the Farm (2013) into selecting a text...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 10, 2014
If Xavier Dolan had done so, then his work might not have been in vain (unless he had taken another stage-work, August : Osage County** (2013), as a starting-point – though, by contrast, Dolan fully succeeds in not making Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme) feel like a play***)…
For, whatever the play by (Michel Marc Bouchard) may have been, Dolan tries to make Tom a sub-Lynchian piece with a horrific undertow, with a vibration set off with Gabriel Yared’s high-frequency string-writing (and the start of a composed soundtrack that seems intrusive to the point of perversity), piccolo even, when nothing is on the screen that gives rise to spookiness, as Tom, arriving at the farm, explores it on his own – cows in a stall, barns and machinery do not resonate with fear, unless, perhaps, they are frightening in their otherness****. However, if one looks at the synopsis on the film’s IMDb page, it claims that Tom is in the grip of grief and depression.
Maybe… Yet, contrary to many people’s belief that it is invisible (Mental ill-health is exactly like a broken leg !), it can be traced in look, posture, demeanour (as was just being written about yesterday in reviewing the superb film The Past (Le passé) (2013)), and Dolan shows no signs, except smiling inappropriately, and a certain clumsiness in conversational pleasantries – which comes across just as a somewhat implausible gaucheness, given that he says that he has a significant role in advertising (of course, that may be a lie).
Not unreasonable for him to be feeling as IMDb describes, but a film should stand for itself, and not rely on any external data to the viewer, and the only fitting account for how Tom appears is that it could be a form of psychotic depression. Clues abound that there is more to what we see than is evident, from a car on a poster with Real Deal as the caption, to the name of the bar (sadly not caught in French (which is in the plural), but something of the kind The Real Thing, to Tom’s hosts disappearing (as if they had never been there), with no sign that they had ever been there.
Suffice to say that, if the whole film is to be interpreted as delusion, induced by a massive natural high, then we are nowhere near the journey from and back to the office in After Hours (1985) (with its inspired dazzling ending, though not the first thoughts for it). We do not even have the resonance of Julianne Nicholson (Ivy), departing from the farm. No, it is then as with The Truman Show (1998) – a paranoid idea about the world blown up into a screenplay, whereas Tom has pretensions of being another Sunset Boulevard [or, originally, Blvd.] (1950) (although actually, if not in its exact scenario, it smacks of Pinter's The Homecoming, with its brooding awkwardness).
One skips to the end, because, with Tom in Tom, one really only cares about – and then relatively little, in fact – what happens to him, which brings us inevitably to the status of what we have seen happening. Is it the psychiatric equivalent of a very bad trip – a Funny Games (1997) without the consequences or implications – and then do we have any reason to be interested… ?
To come, when time and strength permit, a spoilery posting that deals with the rest of the plot, failing which...
'Xavier Dolan's best film', Tom at the Farm (2013) ?
Sadly, @indiewire, that just doesn't say very much about the others...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) June 1, 2014
End-notes
* A touch of ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ – not really built upon in any obvious or coherent way, although Tom has such golden hair…
** Also set in a remote location in North America, and with some challenging family interactions, if of a different kind.
*** Spoiler alert Lee Marshall, at Screen Daily, agrees about the music, but comments instead about the adaptation :
Based on a stage play by Michel Marc Bouchard, who co-wrote the script with Dolan, Tom At The Farm betrays its origins in some overly pretty dialogue and a few scenes (like a tango dance in a barn) where you can practically read the stage directions.
**** Town Mouse and Country Mouse, maybe – given the contrasting setting at the end (apparently an amalgam) ?
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
