Fade to Grey: Dolan's Pop Fashion and Surface Style

ReFocus

The Films of Xavier Dolan

EDITED BY
ANDRÉE LAFONTAINE

Fade to Grey: Dolan’s Pop Fashion and Surface Style

Nick Rees-Roberts

Pop art knows that the fundamental expression of the person is style. -Roland Barthes

Clear from the quotation above by a canonical writer on the subject, this chapter examines Dolan through the superficial lens of style. His cinema to date has been celebrated for an elaborate conjunction of sound and vision, positioned by critics at the intersection of pop aesthetics and consumer culture. His films, moreover, have often either been praised or criticized for their heightened expressive stylization. In this chapter, I assess the relationship between the formal aesthetics of costume design and the social contexts of celebrity and consumerism. Drawing on Dolan’s feature filmography, music videos, and commercial role as a model and ambassador for the luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton, I explore the “fashionability” of the Dolan brand in the broader context of screen media culture. Can we think of Dolan as representing a specific form of popular auteurism that circulates in both the institutional spaces of world cinema and the globalized spaces of online social media? How does this type of pop cinema, at once local and transnational, intersect with the media discourses and cultural representations of celebrity and branding? Going beyond an inquiry into the formal centrality of costume in the production design of Dolan’s films, I also seek to assess the director’s public persona by examining his status within pop culture, a profile that far outstrips that of most world cinema directors. I also investigate the relationship between contemporary fashion and melodrama as a filmic mode, asking how contemporary fashion functions itself as a sort of melodrama, and how it cultivates a melodramatic sensibility. Contemporary consumer culture is often associated with notions of excess and exhaustion that are also shared historically by the

filmic mode of melodrama. Taking the example of Fuste la fin du monde (2016), which won the prestigious Grand Prix at the 2016 International Cannes Film Festival, I argue that the tropes of exaggeration, failure, and vulgarity-all elements of both the contemporary fashion system and the melodramatic imagi-nation-structure Dolan’s film world. If contemporary fashion interrogates the excesses of celebrity, the exhaustion of the designer system, and the hegemony of the global luxury brand-as, in essence, bound up in the cultivation of a melodramatic sensibility as the mode of fashion-Dolan’s cinema of excess might also be symptomatic of this particular cultural configuration.

UGLY-PRETTY: DOLAN’S DESIGNS

Les Amours imaginaires (2010), is a tale of two arch and insecure friends living in Montréal’s hip Mile End neighborhood, who both lust after the same guy. Midway through the film, there is a scene that visually translates the director’s signature style-a contrived exuberance incorporating elaborate set pieces that fold style into the dramatic tension of the narrative. The rival characters, Francis (played by Dolan), and Marie (Monia Chokri), are at a party observing their prey, Nicolas (Niels Schneider), dance with his mother, Désirée (Anne Dorval), who is wearing an electric blue wig.
“Who’s that android?” [he asks her].
“His mother” [she tartly replies]. “She’s called Désirée. He just introduced us. She said I looked like a 1950s housewife. She can’t talk; she looks like Captain Spock. At least I don’t look like some lame New York try-hard.”
“Yeah, but your dress is slightly anachronistic though” [he observes snidely].
“I beg your pardon,” [she replies] “it is vintage, I’ll have you know.”
“Yeah, but just because it’s vintage, that doesn’t means it’s pretty, does it?” [Ignoring his comment, she exhales smoke back in his face.]

Prior to this curt confrontation the rivals are filmed picking out birthday presents for their beloved-Marie chooses a quirky straw boater; Francis goes for a costly cashmere sweater, the garish shade of which she calls out as a potentially risky choice. Their elaborate preparations for the party are meticulously shot in slow motion to amplify the growing antagonism between them. Francis hands a picture of James Dean to his coiffeuse for inspiration; he dresses up in a royal blue suit offset by Cuban heels to equal Marie’s luminous pink gown and shiny gold pumps. Their obsessional rivalry is captured through a shared vanity as well as through the material and symbolic value of their gifts.

Dolan’s strategy is to mock their pretentions while sympathizing with their predicament of unrequited love-an emotional balance that relies on the ironic distance of “camp” as a way of neutralizing the underlying bitchiness of much of their interaction. One might even say, to paraphrase Susan Sontag’s famous “Notes on Camp,” that the film’s overall decorative sensibility is purposefully off, consciously designed to be so awful, it’s good.’ Therein lies, in my view, the aesthetic queerness of Dolan’s cinema.

While they watch Nicolas dance with his mother, Marie and Francis fantasize about his body, producing mental images that Dolan captures in subjective counterpoint: the neon flashes from the dance floor alternate with a series of projections of Renaissance statues (for her) and Cocteau graphics (for him). The imaginary attachments of the film’s original French title (the English, Heartbeats, loses in translation the element of cerebral fantasy in the original) involve the staging of erotic obsession, which contrasts the hyperbolic, aestheticized paraphernalia of vintage style with more ordinary elements of everyday clothing such as Nicolas’s discarded shirt to which Francis furtively masturbates the next morning-a fetishism that Dolan realizes head-on by filming himself sniffing the worn garment, thereby revealing the more perverse drives at work beneath the polished veneer of control that both characters strive to project. Thus, the extended party sequence, from frantic anticipation to needy (albeit interrupted) release, crystallizes the film’s overall vision of desire as a toxic blend of unrequited love and predatory lust; one that is contained behind the civilized mask of ironic self-fashioning.

The film ends with another party held one year later, a vengeful epilogue to the failed love triangle in which, out of social embarrassment, Nicolas attempts to make superficial peace with the duo, a gesture that is violently rejected by Francis who erratically spits his contempt back before resting his head on the shoulder of his confidante like a wounded animal. Nicolas is shown to be a manipulative and self-satisfied hipster and, like Tom, the urban ad exec out of his depth in Tom à la ferme (2013), he sports a sexy leather perfecto and ugly ironic knitwear. The predators meanwhile have upped their game with even sharper haircuts and more tailored outfits as they move onto their next subject, who is played in a cameo by the French actor Louis Garrel, whose teasing smile suggests that the pair have perhaps met their match. The film’s parting shot heralds the return of slow motion (the predictable repetitiousness of which indicates the scripted performance of being in love), closing with an image of Marie and Francis as they head toward the new boy in a trance like moths drawn to a flame.

This example of Dolan’s approach to narrative composition through camp styling and ironic wit shows how he places the “look” of popular fashion-part of the director’s pronounced editorial sensibility-at the “heart” of his stories by making use of multiple surfaces to punctuate the dramatic tension and shape

the worlds that he is imagining. Personal style and self-invention rub up against a more socio-historically inflected understanding of fashion as rooted in both milieu and modernity-the etymological root of the English word “fashion” is in the French for “shaping” (façonner), originally from the Latin verb “to make” (facere); whereas the French term for “fashion” (mode) defines it as emblematic of what it means to be modern. Critical suspicion of fashion in film has historically focused on the perceived over-investment in artifice and surface. Theorist of fashion and film Pamela Church Gibson has described the entrenched elitism in much academic film scholarship that leaves the study of costume design for fashion historians or journalists, thereby diminishing its disciplinary legitimacy. ${ }^{2}$ Criticism is often directed at the sort of production design that submerges the narrative in a stagnant aesthetic coding that relies on the cliched look of the still fashion image. In the case of Dolan, rather than adopting a glossy postmodern aesthetic to neutralize the impact of narrative by emptying it of its thematic content, his cinema of excess ambitiously deploys camp hyperbole and proliferating surfaces precisely as the formal means to embed individual stories of love, longing, and desire within broader cultural questions of conflict, constraint, and power, in relation to contemporary societal issues of identity, language, and location. By referring to camp I am following cultural critic Peter Wollen’s definition of it as rooted in performance. With its “hyperbolic aestheticization” and its “playful connoisseurship of kitsch,” camp, Wollen remarks, is geared toward “the theatricalization of everyday life.” ${ }^{3}$ But, as Sontag observes in her original sketch of camp as a specifically aesthetic sensibility rather than a queer subcultural strategy, the whole point of its investment in artifice is “to dethrone the serious,” to accept "a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content,’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality,’ of irony over tragedy."4 However, I argue that by taking the perceived frivolousness of fashion seriously, by establishing it quite so consistently as a formal framework for his fictions, Dolan rejects the type of high modernist binary oppositions that support Sontag’s more apolitical conception of camp, particularly the artificial distinction between style and content. Put simply, the affected surface style of Les Amours, for example, complements the film’s ironic exposé of the illusions of love. Despite initially clocking Nicolas as a narcissist (“Who is that rather confident poser?” Marie asks Francis as they first spy on him at a dinner party as he plays with his luscious blond curls), they nevertheless fall headfirst for his superficial charms.

Dolan acts as the costume designer for all his films. He clearly not only loves fashion; it is also central to his aesthetic sensibility and worldview in both the lighter pop-inflected romantic dramas like Les Amours, the homoerotic thriller Tom à la ferme, or the more weighty domestic or relational melodramas, Laurence Anyways (2012), Mommy (2014), and Fuste la fin du monde. Critics have remarked on how his breakthrough film J’ai tué ma mère, released

in 2009-when Dolan was just out of adolescence-ambitiously set out his stand through a narrative that explored issues of intimacy, sexuality, and conflict within a stylized formal framework that showcased production design, and costume in particular. Dolan grew up wanting to be a fashion designer, and he has explained in interview that he sees costume, often overlooked by film directors, as central to the process of characterization:

As a young boy I drew lots of fashion clothes. Terrible drawings, but I thought maybe I’d be a designer one day. I make film costumes myself because I love dressing up, love dressing up characters, love imagining what their taste is-where they shop, and how they see themselves. Fashion for characters is like who they want to be, how they want to be seen, or who they truly are. It tells you so much about a character and I think that’s often belittled or neglected by directors. I just think it’s so incredibly important and crucial in establishing who the character is. ${ }^{5}$

Transposing ideas and practices from fashion to cinema, Dolan’s attention to decorative design through costume involves look books that are presented to actors to help flesh out characterization visually by imagining how characters might have acquired clothing or why they might adopt specific looks or might choose to wear specific garments. This approach to production design situates costume as more than a descriptive key to accompany dramatic storytelling, and more like a fundamental part of the designed spectacle of the film. Dolan’s look books include fabrics as well as images gleaned from Instagram and old magazines to give performers the texture of the characters they are to interpret, to document his vision of specific social milieus or historical periods through the affective appeal of both fashion photography and pop music. Questioned by the French cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles about how he researched and documented the style of Laurence Anyzays, a film that covers the exhaustion of a relationship through the male-to-female transition of the protagonist, Laurence (Melvil Poupaud), from 1989 to the late I990s, Dolan explains he used mostly fashion magazines to convey the mood of the decade rather than precise historical documentation from the era. ${ }^{6}$ The film alternates between the more obvious kitsch clichés of the late 1980 and early 1990 -heavy on sequins and shoulder-pads-and less artificial, more realistic sequences in which the styles are less connoted or obvious to situate in time and place. The same approach is taken with regard to the choice of music: pop hits such as Céline Dion’s anthem “Pour que tu m’aimes encore” ironically over-score the emotion of the couple’s imploding relationship in conventional melodramatic mode while other set-pieces, such as the “Fade to Grey” ball scene, adopt music from earlier in the 1980 s. In this remarkable spectacle set to the

soundtrack of Visage’s new wave hit, Laurence’s partner, Fred (Suzanne Clément), momentarily escapes, or possibly fantasizes about escaping, to attend a formal ball, which is shot as a hip homage to the fashion show and the performance style of the early music video. In what follows, I assess Dolan’s cinema through this particular lens of stylization to explore the relationship between the heightened artifice and surface glamour of fashion imagery and the melodramatic sensibility as a filmic mode in his work, fashioned as it is around excess and exhaustion.

POP STYLE: NARRATIVE AND IMAGE

In 2015, Dolan made his most widely viewed piece of work, the sepia-toned six-minute video for pop star Adele’s hit single “Hello,” and his most popular “film” in terms of visibility and recognition. “Hello” was the first single ever to sell a million downloads within a week and the video was seen over 27 million times in the first 24 hours on the entertainment platform Vevo. The singer’s much anticipated return, partially shot in rural Québec using IMAX cameras, was the first music video to use such technology and, paradoxically, caused a stir on social media by including an anachronistic flip cell phone as part of its nostalgic decor for the romantic narrative of lost love. ${ }^{7}$ The video also includes other vintage memorabilia such as a rotary dial phone and a red telephone box installed surreally in a forest, a strategic way of breaking the contemporary realist frame of reference (the “nowness” of representation being routinely indicated by the inclusion of up-to-the-minute technology) by emphasizing the re-evaluation of a forgotten object, seen as démodé and kitsch once relegated to the electronic trash heap. The design choice could also be part of a more calculated anti-commercial strategy to bypass the ubiquitous product placements embedded in contemporary screen fictions by tech corporations like Apple or Samsung.

This overarching tension between forms of mass commodification and authorial origination-between the serial and the individual-is not only germane to pop art and culture’s reproductions of reality, it is also part of the broader aesthetic history of the decorative arts. Published in 1908, Georg Simmel’s essay “The problem of style” first defined stylization as precisely the translation of an individual mode of expression, or personal point of view, to the “shared properties” of the applied arts, whose raison d’être is, after all, to reproduce functional objects of design; the “character of style” therefore replaces “the character of individuality,” in Simmel’s view. ${ }^{8}$ Some fifty years later in her seminal dissection of late-modernist literary and visual culture, Sontag distinguished between style and stylization by defining the latter as “creative mistreatment” occurring "when style and subject are … played

off against one another."9 Stylization was subsequently the cause of hostility toward the glossy postmodern “cinema of the look” (le cinéma du look) in France in the 1980s with its aesthetic transposition of advertising, particularly associated with the impact of pop culture-and the postmodern sensibility of pastiche detected by cultural critic Fredric Jameson. ${ }^{10}$ At its crudest, this parasitical visual sensibility still operates in the work of contemporary filmmakers who stylize their subject matter through surface design alone as, for example, designer-turned-director Tom Ford’s superficial rendition of 1960 s fashion and interior design in $A$ Single Man (2010), in which cinematic narrative is embedded within a larger promotional branding strategy.

But if we accept the accessible formal style of Dolan’s cinema (as well as the charge of narcissism-“you can kiss my narcissistic ass,” he brazenly tweeted back to The Hollywood Reporter in 2013) to be in fact misleading, or “falsely superficial,” then it’s equally important to situate the filmmaker in the broader cultural-commercial context of advanced branding and digital self-promotion, in which, according to film critic Richard Brody, "the auteur’s name seems more like a marketing strategy, the selling of a brand, than the reflection of an artistic practice. ${ }^{13}$ Apart from fellow director Sofia Coppola, Dolan is perhaps the only high profile filmmaker to cultivate close ties to the fashion industry by acting as an “ambassador” for the luxury brand Louis Vuitton. And alongside consumer culture and fashion imagery, we might also ask how Dolan strategically reroutes the genres of mainstream narrative cinema back to their origins in the artifacts of pop art, music, and culture such as fashion design, advertising and magazine editorials, music video, and graphic design. What are the influences on his pop vision, or, in fashion-speak, what cultural representations is he “channeling”? The style of Les Amours-its faux glamour and arch-worldliness-is appealing precisely because the protagonists fail to get it quite right, and their excessive self-fashioning borders on brash. Dolan’s inflection of pop lies in the interstice of these two tendencies: the heady style of his cinema is in essence a mix of the refined and the vulgar. The closed world of romantic citation in Les Amours is only revealed as such in ironic contrast to the documentary style of the fake testimonies that punctuate the story and provide some indication of a world outside the hermetic triangular relationship.

Beyond the allure of sophistication, seduction, and sexiness, pop is also about youth. By the time of his third film, Laurence Anyways, the Cahiers du Cimema explained that in a short time Dolan had come to occupy a free space in international cinema: that of extreme youth. ${ }^{14}$ This generational question is invariably raised in relation to Dolan, not just in the context of his output as a filmmaker, but also his role as a public personality, a star director, actor, and model, one whose media presence has included institutional award speeches, political comments on social media, and photographic appearances in

numerous popular magazines and branded fashion advertisements. Despite his early successful positioning within the prestigious exhibition and distribution circuits of world cinema (all his films to date were first screened at the Cannes, Venice, or Toronto film festivals), his commercial (or, more precisely, self-promotional) status as a savvy impresario-not to mention his career as a child-actor-has yet to be examined. His public profile as an outspoken millennial voice-he is “out” despite rejecting the LGBT label of the Queer Palme award at Cannes in 2012 -shows how his youth is constantly invoked in relation to his popularity. Born in 1989, Dolan’s age is routinely cited as an underlying factor in his initial success and the mainstream press, especially, has focused on this issue much to his chagrin. ${ }^{15}$ When he tied with the veteran Jean-Luc Godard for the Jury prize at Cannes for Mommy in 2014, the manifest age gap between the two directors was commented on. Godard made a backhanded compliment that the award united an old director who had made a young film with a young director who had made an old film-by old he meant old-fashioned, though also possibly accessible and commercial. ${ }^{16}$ It is clearly not by chance that Dolan cites the global box office smash of the I990s lavish romantic drama Titanic (James Cameron, 1997) as his main inter-text and narrative model. The turbulent adolescent, Hubert (Dolan), in I Killed My Mother also has a crush on Leonardo DiCaprio and desire for unreceptive or repressed straight men is a recurring motif in Les Amours and Tom à la ferme. ${ }^{17}$

The cultural span of Dolan’s celebrity is such that his role as model and ambassador for Louis Vuitton menswear is unsurprising despite this being a rare occurrence for an international foreign language filmmaker. It also indicates how Dolan re-inflects the outmoded idea of the auteur as being more in tune with popular commercial discourses of consumerism and creativity in the contemporary digital context. His role as luxury ambassador shows how keen global fashion brands are to connect with a younger demographic (tomorrow’s consumers of luxury goods) to move away from the problematic cultural connotations associated with brand devaluation across the globe through the spread of mass luxury, particularly in China. The point of celebrity branding is to consolidate the star’s market value by creating “synergies” between the brand’s heritage-its codes and values, in marketing terms-and the star’s individual persona. ${ }^{18}$ Dolan’s local fame in Québec began as a child star in advertising and on television, where he dubbed roles and began acting from the age of four. He has claimed the lucrative contract with Louis Vuitton to be a childhood dream come true, ${ }^{19}$ and his work modeling for the brand’s menswear self-consciously taps into the commercial potential of his youth as a representative of his millennial generation without explicitly referencing the content of his cinema. The success of his films in East Asian markets also ensures a receptive audience and consumer base for the brand to reiterate its cross-cultural heritage of travel.

The ad campaign for the brand’s Ombré collection of leather goods, shot by photographer Alasdair McLellan, emphasizes the subject’s dynamic mobility as an urbane on-the-go international filmmaker producing films at a frantic pace, by promoting travel accessories such as leather bags, satchels, and backpacks and essentially foregrounding the product range vicariously through the appeal of the celebrity director. The campaign film-a montage of shots of Dolan modeling the designer Kim Jones’s clothing and accessories-also highlights Dolan’s persona through his informal English-language voice-over commentary, packaged as a mock interview, which talks of the need to surrender to the sensory experience of travel. This connoted image of normative (straight) masculinity, bold, energetic, and forward driving, contrasts with the more seductively subversive (queer) editorial shots of Dolan in style magazines as either a rebellious subject or a passive object, such as those taken by photographers Shayne Laverdière or Paolo Roversi to accompany features in Man About Town and Égoiste in 2018. These editorial images exploit the subject’s edgier status as a disaffected cover boy through the homo-narcissism of fashion photography. Despite not being a conventional pin-up, Dolan is explicitly sexualized through the surface fetishism of Roversi’s photos for Égoiste, which focus on his physique by combining a close-up of the filmmaker-as-torturedartist with more sensual ones of his body, drawing haptic attention to his skin by showing off his tattoos and even revealing his naked ass.

SURFACE AFFECT

In addressing the visual matter of fashion, design, and style-the crucial question for a filmmaker, production, or costume designer being precisely how to convey their sensorial appeal to an audience-it is equally important to recognize their affective impact. This question transposes to the context of mainstream cinema, a turn that cultural theorist Giuliana Bruno has located in fine art practices as a move away from the optic toward a more haptic materiality, one that is engaged with surfaces rather than images as the material substance of visual culture. ${ }^{20}$ Instead of making a purely decorative cinema, ${ }^{21}$ Dolan’s sensitivity to the sensorial appeal of surfaces involves subjecting style to emotion. How, then, do affect and style combine in Dolan’s cinema? At times, the manifest emotionalism of his domestic dramas-the dominant melodramatic mode of $\mathcal{F}$ ai tué ma mère, Mommy, and fuste la fin du monde-is accentuated by the jarring stylistic juxtapositions and visual clichés that over-score the severity of the drama with overtly brash design. The fixed poses of high fashion when combined with the rhythmic mon-

as fashionable set pieces and points at which style is used to break out of the imposed structures of the melodrama and the characters’ self-imposed interiority. Commenting on Mommy, a suburban narrative “bathed in affect,” Bill Marshall argues that Dolan’s surface fetishism complements the extreme emotional states of mind of the dysfunctional mother and son in relation to the alternative spatial and temporal modes of belonging suggested by the film. ${ }^{22}$ This “proliferation of surfaces,” Marshall also explains, “whose playfulness, plurality and expressiveness challenge imposed categories of 'normality,” ${ }^{23}$ began with Laurence Anyways, a film that deploys vintage styling as part of its affective mode.

To ask the question of a film’s fashionable appeal, conveyed as much through tone as through costume, implies a shift in focus from attention to individual looks toward a more complex investigation of vintage style in terms of historical layering. Film theorist Emiliano Morreale has defined vintage cinema as an interdisciplinary relationship between screen and design, between cinema and artistic and commercial practices such as fashion photography and advertising. ${ }^{24}$ By focusing more on design than history, unlike the period or costume drama, vintage is essentially an aesthetic space rather than a temporal marker; it implies reading history through the lens of style, through attention to mood and sensibility as much as to costume or dress. In Laurence Anyways the handling of time, memory and style is complex: the film’s temporal structure traces a decade-long relationship to the point of exhaustion. Fred’s early promise to Laurence on learning of his desire to transition (“we’ll do it together”) sets up the impossibility of the couple’s trajectory, an adventure followed through to its bitter end as they last meet awkwardly in 1999, only to accept reluctantly that they no longer connect.

Alongside the stylized performances of the actors, stop-start rhythms and radical mood changes are key to understanding the film’s visual patterning. The narrative flow is broken up by an abrupt editing style that ruptures the smooth progress of the relationship. This uneven tone, partly a result of the capacious final cut, is important to understanding the film’s address. Dolan stages affective metaphors that function as artistic installations that punctuate the story and melodramatically over-score what the dialogue foregrounds in more subtle ways. In Les Amours, in one of Francis’s daydream fantasies, he pictures Nicolas showered in marshmallows, a stylistic borrowing from Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin (2004). Similarly, when Laurence enters Fred’s life again through writing via a code embedded in her poetry, Fred is literally drenched by a torrential shower that shatters her illusion of happiness and masquerade of domesticity. These visual flourishes are part of Dolan’s larger design to reconfigure the codes and clichés of romantic love in non-hegemonic ways. Such moments of spectacular excess are intentionally shallow; the pop imagery effectively translates mood by literalizing emotion.

Laurence Anyways samples the vulgarly kitsch, including the dry ice and lip gloss of 1980 s music video, with the savagely sophisticated. From a cultural perspective, this eclecticism situates Dolan as part of a post-digital mindset that indiscriminately “channels” past sartorial styles. He developed the film’s aesthetic by copying fashion magazines of the ig80s and 90 (hence the historical blurring of two decades) in which the costume designs fold into one another rather than providing accurate versions of past styles. For example, there is little attempt to convey a credible social setting outside the choreographed orchestration of extras, and the trans milieu is highly codified and theatrically staged through the lens of performance. Passers-by are singled out to make an ethical point about the judgment of others as in the opening sequence, which shows reactions made by anonymous onlookers to the public display of the trans body. Later, students are shot reacting to Laurence who demonstrates her personal courage by parading in slow motion down the corridor in a camp tribute to catwalk glamour. The faces show a range of aversion, curiosity, admiration, and envy. The film mixes sequences shot as moving fashion editorials-for example, the shots of the couple in torment following Laurence’s disclosure-with more neutral images that mark anonymous others out as ordinary, normal, and unfashionable, which in turn conflates the different, queer, and marginal with the high fashion look.

Some critics have perceived Dolan’s rejection of realist social dynamics as a form of narcissistic elitism. ${ }^{25}$ In my view, this position misinterprets the mode of his cinema and its transparent investment in the codes of popular genres (romance and melodrama) and subcultural forms (camp and drag) more than in the (straight) art-house tradition of social realism. If we embrace the film’s anti-naturalistic flourishes, taking Laurence Anyways as a queer fashion film of sorts, how does that affect how we configure the filmmaker beyond the residual category of the indie auteur? Instead of critiquing Dolan’s versatility as a sign of total control or individual narcissism, one might associate it more readily with the aesthetic strategies of today’s branded fashion designers and the citational mood board or mixing board approach of the creative director. Beyond fashion, thinking of Dolan’s approach to narrative through pop is also instructive because it focuses attention on the film’s rhythms, temporal structure, and investment in excess (both the pretty and the garish), a feature developed subsequently with the shocking images of teen violence in the video for French band Indochine’s single “College Boy” in 2013, which concludes with an art installation staging the crucifixion of a gay teenager.

Combining sound with vision, music videos have always promoted fashionable styles as much as music. Fashion photographers such as Jean-Baptiste Mondino and Jean-Paul Goude are earlier examples of ig80s "postmodern "ideo-auteurs,"26 who transformed the music video into a “minor art form” in the words of film critic Serge Daney, who was an early adopter, and influential in

promoting the distinct codes of a form rooted in fragmentation and instantaneity. ${ }^{27}$ While the spectacular “Fade to Grey” ball sequence in Laurence Anyways visualizes energy and excess through speed and movement, Dolan is also known for his use of slow motion. When Fred and Laurence take flight to an island, multicolored CGI clothes slowly rain down on them. Color is also used elsewhere to express Fred’s liberation from domesticity. Brash red lipstick revives her former edginess, expressed through wild dyed red hair, which is used earlier in the film as part of the chaotic clashing motifs in the restaurant confrontation scene. In a mode reminiscent of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s disruptive aesthetics from the ig7os, the decor is more than the setting for the couple’s divergence: it graphically acts it out. Laurence’s appearance oscillates between the natural and the spectacular, instances of which include posed editorial-style shots on a ferry and the campy blue tailored suit with pussy-bow blouse in an interview with a journalist-a drag-inspired look that nods to the expressionistic angular shapes routinely worn by icons of Hollywood glamour such as Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. ${ }^{28}$ From an ideological perspective, Dolan’s trans costuming problematically borders on drag, which is compounded by the casting of a cisgender actor in the title role, a strategy which despite underscoring the constructed artifice of gender performance also potentially reifies and re-naturalizes binary difference through the narrative vehicle of transgender. However, Dolan’s drag-coded styling does also illustrate what film theorist Stella Bruzzi analyzes as an approach to costuming that tends to disrupt, or act independently of, the film’s narrative framework. ${ }^{29}$ For her first appearance in public, Laurence wears harsh, unflattering make-up and boxy, geometric shapes, a look that foregrounds the bravery and confrontation of the act rather than any realistic desire to pass.

This graphic austerity is later echoed in the scenes that recount Fred’s “confinement” at Trois-Rivières, where she is trapped in an angular, modernist house the bleached decor of which encases a woman drained of life. Fred’s earlier vitality is showcased in the ball sequence, which stops time and serves little narrative function but stages the character’s desire for release. The setting does not imitate the original Visage clip from 1981, which contained mostly static shots direct to camera, but it draws on the video for another song played diegetically in the car wash sequences: Kim Carnes’ 1981 hit “Bette Davis Eyes,” which features the androgynous singer performing at a costume ball. Theorist of popular music Simon Frith has argued that one function of pop music is its static quality, its ability to stop time. ${ }^{30}$ The elliptical format of the clip enables Dolan to juxtapose diegetic reality (Fred’s self-confident arrival at the ball as she strides through the admiring crowd wearing a luminous Yves Saint Laurent couture cape) with her own subjective fantasy (the spectacular, slow motion tracking forward movement as she floats through the crowd articulates her release from the confrontational outburst in the café).

The self-contained scene works as an escape mechanism into an idealized parallel reality: into the world of fashion. Dolan draws on the full battery of pop clichés-from elliptical jump cuts to oblique close-ups-going heavy on the dry ice and wind machines. The shots alternate between Fred’s glamorous revolve and her cocky procession through the crowd before dissolving to an exterior shot of Laurence seated alone on a bus. Just like the camp icon Dalida’s version of “Bang Bang,” which is played on a loop in Les Amours, the ball sequence encapsulates Dolan’s idiosyncratic blend of narrative, music, and styling within a film that explores the formal tension between surface brilliance (fashion and the look) and thematic depth (identity and the body).

HOME IS WHERE IT HURTS: COSTUME AND CLASS

In the narrative context of Laurence Anypays, the ball scene works as a fantasy escape mechanism for Fred to enter a seductive dream world, to leap from the domesticity of the home onto the public stage of style. The focus on the judgmental stares from the assembled guests, who range from the chic to the freaky (including the fleeting presence of the director), also points to the cultural exclusivity of taste that frames the film’s contrived vision of an urban creative milieu. By contrast, the intentionally failed taste and vulgar fashions of Dolan’s lower middle-class suburban or provincial mothers raise other more complex questions of age, femininity, class, and regional identity in relation to the handling of costume design. Dolan’s creative cultivation of lowbrow styling, one that is intentionally tasteless, might be a case of “naïve camp,” in Sontag’s understanding, of a form of “seriousness that fails.” ${ }^{35}$ However, it also finds more high-brow parallels in designer fashion, in the contemporaneous trend for re-aestheticized “ugly” styles associated with designer Demna Gvasalia’s creations for the labels Vetements and Balenciaga, and elsewhere in the “new baroque” sensibility noted by curator Judith Clark in her radical reassessment of the creativity of the vulgar in fashion history for the 2016 Barbican exhibition in London, The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined. Rather than simply denoting outlandish garments, the "new “baroque” designs are based on the assumption that "a desire for excess is the norm. They improvise with the leftovers of other styles: they are testing new ground, without the compromise of established taste. ${ }^{135}$

A desire for excess is the norm: this idea also describes Dolan’s practice of costuming and stylization. The early stages of J’ai tué ma mère contrast the gaudy decor and dowdy style of Hubert’s mother (Anne Dorval)-ornate furnishings, mannequin trinkets, and a leopard print coat-with the modernity of boyfriend Antonin’s (François Arnaud) mother, Hélène (Patricia Tulasne), who is youthfully dressed and sexually liberated. The later image of suburban housewives dressed as hyperbolic tributes to soap opera divas is extended

through the brassy look of Diane ‘Die’ Després (Dorval) in Mommy, whose character and location (a struggling widow in lower middle-class suburbia) are represented through clothing and setting in the camerawork of the film’s opening shots: in the lingering close-up of a pair of boxer shorts drying on the washing line, followed by a pan shot of her tight studded jeans, costume is again revealed as the entry key to characterization. However, these looks are plain compared to the extravagant designs for Martine (Nathalie Baye), the mother in Fuste la fin du monde, the first shots of whom focus on her bejeweled fingers and varnished nails as she busily prepares for the return, after an absence of twelve years, of her gay son, Louis (Gaspard Ulliel), a celebrated writer, who returns home to announce his imminent death, and whom she describes stereotypically enough as loving fashion. The artificiality of her look (a dark fitted suit, chunky gold necklace, black wig, and blue eye shadow) is criticized by her volatile daughter Suzanne (Léa Seydoux) for resembling a “tranny.” The script therefore acknowledges the contribution of style to the film’s operative mode-its melodramatic sensibility-by integrating costume and decor as features of the dramatic performances as much as the production designs. The transphobic slur also serves to acknowledge the more intertextual drag styles of some of Dolan’s mothers, whose looks, in true serial pop fashion, tend to resemble one another. But Baye’s costume is not just a superficial gag; it also makes an emotional point: Martine is over-dressed for the reunion lunch and her look is out of context and embarrassing. Failed aspirations and social immobility form part of the theme of affective disconnection and spatial dislocation, which is articulated through the linguistic patterns-the disjointed phrasing and abrupt rhythms-of the source text, Jean-Luc Lagarce’s original 1999 stage play. The moving scene, in which Martine tries in vain to communicate with Louis, ends with their prolonged embrace, the son clutching his mother’s suit jacket for comfort.

The expressive codes of melodrama have often been linked to the performances of screen stars. ${ }^{33}$ Dolan cast five of French cinema’s most famous faces and bankable names, three of whom, like the director, have secured lucrative contracts to model for fashion brands: Marion Cotillard for Christian Dior, Léa Seydoux for Louis Vuitton and Prada, and Gaspard Ulliel for Chanel. In “Signs of melodrama,” Christine Gledhill argues that the link between screen melodrama and stardom involves a process of personalization; the formal role of the star “as a composite structure” is "to manage the tension between melodrama’s emblematic, non-psychological personae and its drive to realize in personal terms social and ethical forces. ${ }^{334}$ Dolan conjoins melodrama with stardom by setting virtually the entire film in a domestic huis clos and framing it through a series of intense close-ups to maximize the emotional intensity of the series of exchanges between Louis and each family member. Gledhill further explains that melodramatic excess "exists in paradoxical relation to the form’s

commitment to the real world. ${ }^{35}$ Excess, then, has been read as a mode of critique, a symptom of the ideological contradictions that are channeled through the visual, through formal features such as set and costume. The opening montage sequence alternates between Louis’s taxi ride from the airport-elegantly orchestrated by director of photography André Turpin in a series of pseudodocumentary tracking shots of local inhabitants, ghosts from the past who are shot from Louis’s perspective-and the domestic images of his mother at work. As elsewhere in Dolan’s cinema, the ambiguous gazes of strangers oppose antagonistically the successful creative urban exile-the queer artist in this instance-against the faces and activities of ordinary local folk. ${ }^{36}$ The foreboding non-diegetic pop song ironically undercuts Martine’s careful preparations for the family meal-“home is not a harbor, home is where it hurts,” warns the singer Camille.

The exaggeration and exposure that characterize the subsequent scenes also form part of the film’s intentionally melodramatic mode and its emotional translation through costume and decor. The opening montage ends to the chime of a cuckoo clock, a kitsch design feature that reoccurs in disruptive fashion at the film’s end in a spectacularly over-determined metaphor in which the bird flies out of the clock only to flounder and drop to the floor. This supremely kitsch expression of fake emotion ironically deflates the tension by literalizing the exhaustion of the domestic drama, the tense build-up to the protagonist’s failure to disclose his illness and his expulsion from the family cell. The kitsch object effectively lays bare the poignant denouement as a sentimental artifice. Sontag included this type of deployment of camp as a distancing device in her taxonomy, describing how it "refuses both the harmonies of traditional seriousness, and the risks of fully identifying with extreme states of feeling. ${ }^{37}$ Moreover, in a commentary on Sontag’s notes, literary critic Terry Castle links repressed memories of home, of domestic confinement and childhood disappointment (like the urbane Louis’s unglamorous rural origins) as a psychic context for understanding camp styling. Drawing on Sontag’s own disavowed feelings of being misplaced, Castle argues that camp
mediates . . . between childhood outrage and a more sophisticated “adult” self. From one angle, camp objects summon up the detested paraphernalia of the past-they are emblems of that world of ugliness, dishonesty, and emotional bathos one prides oneself on having escaped or transcended. ${ }^{38}$

Castle thus specifically links the attachment to the ugly to affective states like shame and suffering. She could also be summarizing the action in Dolan’s film. The theatrical framing device that precedes the opening credit sequence shows Louis’s plane journey while he recounts in voice-over his decision to return

home after a prolonged absence. This subjective frame conditions the perspective of the subsequent melodrama, of scenes that could well be read as the character’s own fearful imagining of what is to follow or the writer’s traumatic fantasy of the immediate future shot through the ambivalent lens of past suffering. We do not learn exactly why Louis severed contact with his family; only Antoine’s wife, Catherine (Marion Cotillard) intuits the real reason for his visit. In one scene, she discovers Louis alone in the garage surrounded by his former belongings, haunted by the discarded paraphernalia of his past. It is precisely the affective sincerity of these dramatic scenes that is punctured by the kitsch design and phony emotion of the final moments of the film.

How critical, ironic, or distanced this type of stylistic maneuver is in Dolan’s cinema more broadly is unclear, and the purposeful inclusion of “unfashionable” music tracks by the likes of Dido and Moby in his films would seem to indicate a more immediate understanding of pop simply as popular and mainstream"vulgar" in the sense of vernacular. The accessible appeal of Dolan’s cinema (not to mention the relative global box office success of a film like Mommy) is therefore a way of countering the elitist pretensions of the auteur and market positioning of indie “world” cinema. Dolan achieves this through style and content, through genre and location, and by examining questions of aesthetic value and taste, which are germane to both pop music and fashion culture.

Dolan’s popular appeal through style indicates how hierarchies of taste are still important to thinking about contemporary practices of film costuming. Social questions of class, milieu, and distinction haven’t entirely been subsumed by the eclectic self-expression associated with contemporary designer fashions and popular street styles. Recent hyperbolic talk of the end of the fashion system suggests the cultivation of excess to be a new industry norm. Dolan’s signature style-both personal and cinematic, cultivated through a public and commercial profile that straddles indie cinema and fashion brand-ing-makes creative use of excess (both melodrama and camp) to shape and visualize narrative through the practice of costume design.

As I have argued, Dolan takes fashion seriously as an integral part of the visual elaboration of his storytelling. But rather than view his cinema as superficial or modish, I have attempted to recuperate its mobilization of pop style and decorative styling as a lens through which to consider his narratives of romance, desire, longing, and transformation. The signature flourishes of excess that characterize Dolan’s aesthetic are certainly heady (and evidently off-putting for some critics and audiences-Fuste la fin du monde was, indeed, booed following its presentation in competition at Cannes in 2016) and they signal an inscription within a queer melodramatic tradition; this despite his own vocal disliking of the LGBTQ minority label. In my view, criticisms of Dolan’s cinema as formally elitist or socially condescending miss the point precisely because they overlook the mode of his films-how they work as authorial

covers of popular genres such as the queer romance, melodrama, or fashion film, and also how they use style-especially costume and production designas a key point of entry into dramatic narrative.

NOTES

I. Sontag’s final note reads: “The ultimate Camp statement: it’s good because it’s awful.” Susan Sontag, “Notes on 'Camp,” in Against Interpretation (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 292.
2. Pamela Church Gibson, “Film costume,” in John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (eds), Film Studies: Critical Approaches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 35.
3. Peter Wollen, Raiding the Icebox: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture (London: Verso, 1993), p. 16I.
4. Sontag, Against Interpretation, p. 287.
5. Xavier Dolan quoted in Luke Seomore, “Why Xavier Dolan’s mesmerising new drama is a must-watch,” Another Magazine, February 27, 2017. Available at <http://www. anothermag.com/design-living/9579/why-xavier-dolans-mesmerising-new-drama-is-a-must-watch> (accessed June I, 2017).
6. Xavier Dolan, “Xavier Dolan: 'Tous mes films parlent d’un amour impossible,” interview by Jean-Marc Lalanne, Les Inrockuptibles, July 18, 2012. Available at <https://www. lesinrocks.com/2012/07/18/cinema/xavier-dolan-tous-mes-films-parlent-dun-amour-impossible-II279693/> (accessed August 29, 2018).
7. Patricia Garcia, “Meet Xavier Dolan, the indie director behind Adele’s ‘Hello’ music video,” Vogue, October 27, 2015. Available at <https://www.vogue.com/article/xavier-dolan-adele-hello-video?verso=true> (accessed August 29, 2018).
8. Georg Simmel, “The problem of style,” Theory, Culture and Society, 8/63, 1991, pp. 64, 65.
9. Sontag, “On style,” in Against Interpretation, p. 19.
10. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and consumer society,” in Hal Foster (ed.), The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1983), pp. III-25.
II. Guillaume Narduzzi, “Xavier Dolan: ses déclarations les plus décoiffantes,” Le Figaro, last updated September 20, 2016. Available at <http://www.lefigaro.fr/ cinema/2016/09/20/03002-20160920ARTFIG00286-xavier-dolan-ses-plus-retentissantes-declarations.php> (accessed August 28, 2018).
12. Jean-Philippe Tessé, “Aller plus haut,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 680, July-August 2012, p. 42. My translation.
13. Richard Brody, “An auteur is not a brand,” New Yorker, July 10, 2014. Available at <https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/an-auteur-is-not-a-brand> (accessed August 29, 2018).
14. Stéphane Delorme, “Xavier Dolan, X/Y,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 678, May 2012, p. 36.
15. For example, the reviewer for Sight $\mathcal{E}$ Sound opened his article on Laurence Anyways thus:

Xavier Dolan’s third feature finds the 23-year old Québécois filmmaker giving ever-freer rein to his ambition. Dolan’s prodigiously talented directorial debut J’ai tué ma mère caused a sensation at its première in Cannes in 2009, when the director had just turned twenty; and Dolan showed no strain in following it up, with Heartbeats ready for unveiling at the next year’s festival.
Samuel Wigley, “Laurence Anyways,” review of Laurence Anyways directed by Xavier Dolan, Sight $\mathcal{E}$ Sound, 22/12, 2012, p. 95 .

16. “Ils ont réuni un vieux metteur en scène qui fait un jeune film avec un jeune metteur en scène qui fait un film ancien.” Jean-Luc Godard quoted in Pierre de Gasquet, “Xavier Dolan Le dandy enragé,” Les Echos Week-end, September 23, 2016. Available at <https:// www.lesechos.fr/23/09/2016/LesEchosWeekEnd/00046-013-ECWE_xavier-dolan-le-dandy-enrage.htm> (accessed August 29, 2018). My translation.
17. Stéphane Delorme and Jean-Philippe Tessé, “Titanic: entretien avec Xavier Dolan,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 680, 2012, pp. 42-4.
18. Dolan’s current notoriety extends beyond cinema: in the second season of the French TV sitcom, Dix pour cent/Call My Agent (France 2, 2017), the character of a megalomaniac wunderkind filmmaker, who terrorizes Isabelle Adjani, is allegedly based on the Dolan persona. Marine Chassagnon, “Dix pour cent’ s’est inspiré dans la saison 2 de Xavier Dolan pour créer un cinéaste insupportable,” HuffPost, Edition FR, last updated April 26, 2017, 04:54 CEST. Available at <https://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2017/04/25/dix-pour-cent-sest-inspire-de-xavier-dolan-pour-creer-un-cine_a_22035263/> (accessed August 29, 2018).
19. Seomore, “Why Xavier Dolan’s mesmerising new drama is a must-watch.”
20. Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 3-5.
21. The dismissal of the decorative is something Rosalind Galt has traced as a denigration of the pretty. Galt locates a “discomfort with a style of heightened aesthetics that is too decorative, too sensorially pleasurable to be high art, and yet too composed and ‘arty’ to be efficient entertainment.” Rosalind Galt, Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 12.
22. Bill Marshall, “Spaces and times of Québec in two films by Xavier Dolan,” Nottingham French Studies, 55/2, 2016, p. 201.
23. Bill Marshall quoted in Kester Dyer, Andrée Lafontaine, and Fulvia Massimi (eds), “Interview with Bill Marshall,” Synoptique, 4/2, 2016, p. 113.
24. Emiliano Morreale, “Le cinéma vintage,” trans. Lili Hinstin, Cahiers du Cinéma, 673, 2011, pp. 16-19.
25. See Alexandre Fontaine Rousseau, “Culte de la personnalité: le cinéma de Xavier Dolan,” 24 images, 173, September 2015, pp. II-I3.
26. Richard Dienst, Still Life in Real Time: Theory After Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 84.
27. See Serge Daney, Le Salaire du zappeur (Paris: P.O.L, 1993), pp. 103-5 and Ciné-Journal 1981-1986 (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1986), pp. 299-300. On the larger relationship between music video and fashion film, see Nick Rees-Roberts, Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 32-5.
28. On the broader relationship between fashion and transgender in Laurence Anyways, see Katrina Sark, “The language of fashion and (trans)gender in Dolan’s Laurence Anyways,” Synoptique, 4/2, 2016, pp. 127-34.
29. See Stella Bruzzi, Undressing Cinema: Clothing and Identity at the Movies (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997).
30. See Simon Frith, “Towards an aesthetic of popular music,” in Taking Popular Music Seriously (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 257-74.
31. Sontag, Against Interpretation, p. 283.
32. Judith Clark, “The new baroque,” in Jane Alison and Sinéad McCarthy (eds), The Vulgar: Fashion Redefined (London: Barbican/Koenig Books, 2016), p. 166.
33. See, for example, Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of sound and fury: observations on the family melodrama,” in Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home Is Where The Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987), pp. 43-69.

Christine Gledhill, “Signs of melodrama,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (Abingdon: Routledge, 1991), p. 214.
Ibid. p. 213.
The complexity of the gazes in Dolan’s cinema is analyzed in Corey Kai Nelson Schultz, “The sensation of the look: the gazes in Laurence Anyzays,” Film Philosophy, 22/1, February 2018, pp. 1-20.
Sontag, Against Interpretation, p. 287.
Terry Castle, “Some notes on 'Notes on Camp,” in Barbara Ching and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor (eds), The Scandal of Susan Sontag (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 28.