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Gay Pantheon: Xavier Dolan









You don't know Mr. Dolan's work, and yet you do. He's the young gay man responsible for Adele's "Hello" video. He has also made a few well-loved indie movies, including the semi-autobiographical "I Killed My Mother," which involves two young men painting the walls of a house, then having lively sex. (You can find that scene on Youtube!)

(Gays and their mothers! Dolan may be familiar with gay icon Colm Toibin, whose semi-recent book of essays was entitled, "New Ways to Kill Your Mother.")

Anyway, I haven't seen any of Dolan's movies, but all I need is five minutes with the "Hello" video to be certain of Dolan's semi-campy genius. Why doesn't Adele work with Dolan all the time? She seems to think that she is not the "visual icon" that--e.g.--Beyonce is. But I don't agree. I want more Adele/Dolan collaborations.

More is more, and Dolan piles on the melodrama. I especially like the number of phones: the flip phone ("I can't get a signal!" "Can you hear me now?"), the rotary phone, the crazy enchanted C.S. Lewis outdoor phone-booth, swamped with curvy serpentine vines. Why is there a phone-booth in Adele's backyard? And is she really in California, dreaming, as she claims? Who cares? Xavier Dolan has a vision!

I love, also, the spectacle of the tea-making. Dolan imagines Adele's country retreat as a kind of haunted house, with dusty sheets necessitating dramatic air-it-out snapping motions. Windows are opaque and then they aren't; new worlds are revealed behind two-way mirrors; ghostly figures shift in and out of focus. The tea preparation involves a sudden flickering of the flame, a swirling cloud of steam over a little cup. It's fun to be in the presence of someone--Dolan--who has so much love for the physical world.

Adele wanted a black man to play her former lover; this was a month when the cops were murdering a higher-than-average number of black people, and Adele felt that the depiction of an interracial love would send a message. The selected actor does most of the creative heavy-lifting in this video. He is a kinetic wonder, darting through halls, talking non-stop, flirting, becoming argumentative, tensing his jaw, shaking his head, looking glum in something that appears to be a rainy Best Buy parking lot. At one point, a figure behind the camera throws a scarf at him--and this act of aggression appears to be the breaking point in the tragic romance we've been following. (Bridge-burning scarf weaponry! It's Xavier Dolan. Go with it.)

As the song reaches its climax, the images become more and more surreal; Adele is now in a puffy fur coat, caressing herself and looking mournful near a pond. A windstorm assaults her; her voluminous hair becomes a third character, and it might do even more expressive work than the face of the singer herself. (These gesticulating-by-the-pond moments are so wonderfully silly, they led to an inevitable SNL parody, with Aidy Bryant in the role of the aggrieved/struggling singer.)

The point is just that realism sucks. Why stick to bland, linear storytelling when you can have the ghostly former lover flitting in and out of Adele's field of vision? Why put Adele in an actual California setting when you can make use of this evocative Agatha Christie-ish haunted house? Watch how the lover becomes a shadow, and then takes on corporeal form again. Watch the snapping of the dusty sheets again: Young, exuberant Dolan seems to be saying, "I dare you to tell me this is too much."

A video director doesn't have paint and brushstrokes; he doesn't have paragraphs and sentences. He has a singer with limited acting talents, and he has some found objects, some teacups, some sofas, some telephones. Dolan discovers joy and mystery in each of these objects. He communicates his intense pleasure to us--the pleasure of making something, of stretching his vision. And so we have two geniuses--Adele and Dolan--working with different tools, collaborating, bringing us something greater than the sum of its parts.

https://www.google.com/search?q=adele+hello&oq=adele+hello&aqs=chrome.0.69i59l2j69i61j0l3.1957j1j9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

P.S. The point of the tea-produced steam cloud and the swarm of dust from the old sheets? I think Dolan just wants to create a sense of ghostliness. You see that with the filthy windows, as well. And the way the lover is present, then shadowy, then back to present/physically in-the-room. Adele is reliving her past even as she suggests she is now somewhere new: "Hello from the other side." (Adele is a border crosser, in a painful "limbo" area, where interesting things tend to happen.) The horrors of A's aborted romance revisit her even as she attempts to stay calm: "It don't matter. It clearly doesn't tear you apart anymore." All of this tension is nicely managed, and it feels true to actual life.
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