Montréal's most welded friends group gather in a summer cottage on the edge of the autumn. They should play games, talk fast, be drunk, swim and smoke braj. Typically, one of the friends' shitty little sister is also there, a pretentious and daring film school student working on a school project.
It seems that from childhood, Matthi and Max welded up to join the film, their effort is small but involves a kiss. This evokes a dam of repressed feelings. Max, the working guy with messy home conditions seems to be controlling the emotions (we have been kissed before, don't you remember?) But Matthi, the financial striker goes into a crisis and tries by all means to deny his feelings. He has a lot more to lose.
Xavier Dolan constantly returns to his themes: emotional confusion and relationships, preferably between mother and son. Matthias & Maxime are among his more cozy and romantic films, although the aesthetically pleasing environment of French-speaking Canada remains. As so often Dolan himself plays the lead role, here he makes Max go to Australia and look for a job and finally get rid of the guardianship of his awkwardly rendered drug addict to mom.
As soon as Anne Dorval enters as the moody mother, it becomes understandable why Max needs to move to the other side of the globe. She is witty, ungrateful and mean. That Max is still a decent overall and whole person he seems to be able to thank his large social network for. The friends and their moms.
This is a movie where the quick dialogue and the chemistry of the actors is everything. It is talked and quarreled and thawed and chewed constantly. The group of friends is diverse, they come from different classes of society. Someone is finance shark, another bartender at a strip club, a third is just born rich. They gather around their common childhood and a fondness for drinking and word games. It's fun, warm and tender. The scenes are often large, wide-ranging images that curl up with people and snacks, as well as close-up studies of how Max and Matthi are hurt.
Although Dolan moves in the fields of the hidden emotions does not mean that people are silent and introverted. On the contrary, they let all their frustrations come out in other ways, they weave in blinds and giggles, fight and fight with the wrong people and for the wrong reasons.
It never gets boring or crazy, but probably this tricky love story would have won it down a bit. It is as if Dolan becomes slightly in love with her characters and their unhappiness and lets the brilliant acting, especially by Dolan and D'Almeida Freitas in the lead roles, spread at the expense of the story as a whole.
In the end, he does everything in port and then he does it with emotional fingertip feeling and leaves me as a cordial, sobbing dish cloth.