Terrifying mother-and-son bond

Xavier Dolan's Mommy is a speedball love song to the bonds between mothers and sons - and to a particularly lunatic mother (an amazing Anne Dorval) and son (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) who carom around the Quebec suburbs leaving emotional and physical destruction in their wake.

I haven't seen Dolan's 2009 film, I Killed My Mother, in which the French Canadian writer/director cast himself as a gay teen and put Dorval in the title role, but if it's anything like Mommy, it's got to be scary and wild, forthright and furious.

In Mommy, Dorval is Diane, nickname Die, and Pilon is Steve, a kind of teenage Johnny Rotten, returning to the nest from a state facility, sulking, masturbating, occasionally beaming affection to the woman who brought him into the world - and who now has checked him out of the institution. Steve has ADHD, and is prone to bursts of violence. Die is prone to slutty exhibitionism and bracing candor. Together, they're like conjoined tornadoes, gyring around supermarket parking lots and office parks, sending innocent bystanders ducking for (metaphoric) cover.

Enter Kyra (Suzanne Clément), a neighbor who lives across the way with her husband. Die, three years a widow, hires her to tutor Steve, and the next thing you know, the trio is boogieing to the soulful incantations of Céline Dion (the ultimate in Canadian kitsch), singing along to "On Ne Change Pas" ("We Don't Change") in an erotic reverie.

Kyra seems like a normal, sensible housewife type, but under Die and Steven's (bad) influence, the inner Kyra - sorrowful, sensual, fragile, game - emerges. More cheesy and momentous pop (Oasis' "Wonderwall," Dido's "White Flag") hits the sound track, and more mayhem ensues.

Dolan has framed his film - winner of the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival in May - in a square 1:1 aspect ratio. As in old silents, the compressed screen image has the double effect of focusing one's attention on the actors, their faces, their eyes, and giving the action a kind of dioramic, tableau feel. But then - and this is a spoiler, not of plot, but of technique - a few pivotal, epiphanic moments sneak in there and the screen suddenly goes wide, expanding to let the film's characters take in the world, and get lost in it.

Mommy is too long for its own good, its sense of hysteria too relentless. But the headlong energy is intoxicating more than exhausting, and Freud would have a field day with Die and Steve. A mother and child, so sweet, so tender, so terrifying.

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Mommy  *** (Out of four stars)

Directed by Xavier Dolan. With Anne Dorval, Antoine-Olivier Pilon, Suzanne Clément. In French with subtitles. Distributed by Roadside Pictures.
Running time: 2 hours, 19 mins.
Parent's guide: R (violence, sex, profanity, adult themes).
Playing at: Ritz Bourse.