The night Logan woke up
director and screenwriter: Xavier Dolan
Distribution: Eric Bruneau, Xavier Dolan, Magalie Lépine-Blondeau, Anne Dorval
Country: Canada
Duration: 60 minutes approx. (5 episodes)
Year: 2022
Gender: dramatic ‘tension’
Premiere: 27 June 2023 (Motion Picture)
Xavier Dolan He’s still young (34), but he seems to have ceased to be that prodigy of Canadian cinema that dazzled the Cannes judges. modern melodramas about mother-child relationships, hidden personality traits, or the weight of death in life. Partly because, yes, he’s grown. And partly because even some of his biggest fans have admitted that some time ago Dolan peaked with ‘Mommy’ in 2016 and some of his later films, especially ‘End of the World’, gave Dolan a lot of reason to his audience. they saw a smug artist in the director, screenwriter and actor.
And then comes the mini-series “The Night Logan Awakens” To remember what Dolan was capable of. It’s almost five hours of footage, but interestingly, they show the filmmaker wisely measuring his characters’ words and valiantly insisting on his words. Fill your images with expressiveness, an almost hopeless romance.Despite declaring in ‘Les Inrockuptibles’ that his intentions were really to make television and that he knew the dynamics and rhythm would be different from his movies.
The starting point is a play by Michel Marc Bouchard (who is also the author of the text on which ‘Tom on the Farm’ is based), but the series is pure Dolan at its core. themes of family conflict, self-humiliation, or survival in the face of a world that hates the other, the different. It’s already one of some generics in the ‘Seven’ style, no matter what, a keen willingness to play on the basis of gender to disguise family drama as ‘”‘income‘ and even dare with terror codes if the situation permits. Backed by intense original music. Hans Zimmer and director David Fleming shoots some of the most exciting sequences of his career here.
Among them (at least in part) is the (controlled and perfect) night of the title night, the night when Mireille’s young brothers’ friendship broke down. Jasmine Leme) and Julien (Elijah Patrick) with his neighbor Logan (Pier Gabriel Lajoie). Something has changed, everything has changed. The shock wave reached the rest of the Larouche brothers, namely Denis (Eric Bruneau), the person acting as a father figure for all, and the youngest of the clan, Elliot (Dolan himself).
A quarter of a century later, when they met due to the death of their mother Mado (mother dorval, a core asset for Dolan), they’re all broken in some way. mireille (now Julie LeBreton) returns to the fictional Val-des-Chutes as a famous theatologist (and with the intention of embalming Mado, as he wishes in his last wishes), but his intimate life is far from idyllic. Julien (now Patrick Hivon) is struggling unfortunately to continue with their studies after they have stopped drinking and consuming; Elliot is still in rehab and living like a Diogenes since Denis got divorced. As expected, the past is getting in the wayslowly but surely.
The series format allows Dolan to dose the information and give the audience time to put the pieces together themselves. Sophisticated writing gradually gives way to anticipated moments of catharsis and anger, and likewise, visual forms that at first seem limited or even television visuals eventually become instinctive. We have finally entered the land of the first and best Dolan. the serious and the frivolous coexisted shamelessly, represented here by that biker as if straight out of the video store classic ‘El aparecido’. With additional benefit of experienceHe shows this in the decisions he makes with the camera.
The fact that original music has such an availability also doesn’t mean Dolan parks his job as a great song picker: here they sing “Dreams made meat”, among many other things. This Deadly Coil With Lisa Gerrard, one of the ‘Fascination Street’ favorites Exchange rate or ‘Chimeras’ Tim Hecker. There’s also an almost obligatory reference to Céline Dion, this time to the “Regarde-moi” rhythm at the moment of karaoke.