Like a big
Chekhov's gun with the price tag still attached inevitably destined to go off
in the final act — no real spoiler here — a sci-fi premise opens Xavier Dolan's
latest film: in the year 2015, a superimposed text informs, a Canadian law is
enacted that allows parents of mentally ill children to give them in full and
irreversible custody to the state's health care system. This not only gives us
a rather precise idea about where the story is going to end, but also speaks
volumes about how superficial is going to be Dolan's approach to mental
illness. Because how blinkered you have to be to ignore how inadequately, to
put it mildly, institutions have treated and still treat psychiatric disorders
in most societies, and to even make a futuristic preamble out of a burning
social problem. The longstanding issue of whether psychiatric patients should
be taken care of by the government or the family has no simple solution;
involuntary seclusion, and I'm not complaining, is still applied when they threaten
other people's safety or their own, with great sadness on the part of the
families and those involved. By just setting his movie in the present day Mr.
Dolan would have had as much tragedy as he liked.
