Maple Syrup Massacre is an editorial series where Joe Lipsett dissects the themes, conventions and contributions of new and classic Canadian horror films. Spoilers follow…

There’s a moment, very late in Tom at the Farm, when the film’s antagonist Francis Longchamp (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) wears a denim jacket with USA emblazoned on the back. The film’s protagonist – Tom (Xavier Dolan, also the co-writer and director) – has been held hostage by Francis for several weeks by this point while the pair role play domestic roles in a psychosexual power game. Francis, it should be noted, is also the older brother of Tom’s recently deceased lover and Tom submits to the ruse, in part, because Francis smells and resembles his ex.

At the end of the film, however, Tom finally flees into the Québec woods, steals Francis’ car, and escapes back to the safety of Montreal, the largest city in the province and the third biggest in Canada.

There are several Canadian elements embedded within the aforementioned plot synopsis of Dolan’s adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard’s play of the same name. Tom at the Farm leans into the urban vs rural divide (last discussed in Rituals) and the film employs the same Canadian male archetypes outlined by Robert Fothergill in Backcountry, the very first entry of this editorial series. There’s also a conversation to be had about the “French-ness” of the film, which is often depicted and/or treated as its own nation in Canadian cinema (see the entry on Rabid for a partial historical primer).

Tom at the Farm begins with a post-credit aerial sequence as Tom drives through the Québecois countryside. Bill Marshall’s article “Spaces and Times of Québec in Two Films by Xavier Dolan” immediately identifies the “rectilinear road through fields and farms” as Richelieu (the film was shot around Saint-Blaise, QB), evident by “the division into rangs…that characterized New France’s cadastral system, the twentieth-century network of paved roads for motor traffic.”

In his article, Marshall explores how the film fits into not only “representations in Québec fiction of the countryside… but also of the (re)transplantation of the urban subject/protagonist into a rural setting.” In this sense, Tom is a fish out of water: a big city advertising executive who finds himself out of his depth when he becomes embroiled in the lives of his dead lover’s mother Agathe (Lise Roy) and her surviving adult son, who still lives with her and works the family farm.

Fulvia Massimi’s piece “A Boy’s Best Friend is His Mother: Québec’s Matriarchy and Queer Nationalism in the Cinema of Xavier Dolan” believes that “Dolan’s fascination for [the play] is understandable, since it provides the ground for a close examination of disturbed familial dynamics as well as the key to accessing Québec’s nationalist discourse through a different stylistic approach.” Dolan has made a career, at least early on, of exploring the emotionally fraught relationships between mothers and sons (see: I Killed My Mother, Mommy, Heartbeats, etc).

Massimi’s analysis centers less around Tom than Francis, who she believes is representative of the identity politics that arose in the wake of the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. That Francophone Nationalism project, lead by politician Jean Lesage, involved “a series of drastic political, societal and cultural changes” (The Canadian Encyclopedia) as the province moved away from the Catholic church and towards modernization and secularization. This involved taking control of the schools, training future francophone leaders for politics, and the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism which confirmed English and French as the bilingual official languages of Canada.

The Quiet Revolution was heavy with gendered and homophobic connotations. As Massimi explains, the 60s movement was equated with “the promotion of male heterosexual power as a way to overcome the myth of Québec’s “homosexual” nation—since [it had been] historically emasculated by the Church and subjugated by the Anglophone colonizer.” From this perspective, a new Québec needed to get out from under the oppression of the Church and the English (speaking politicians and citizens) in order to become its own entity.

By comparison, “Bouchard [the playwright]’s more contemporary work offers a significant account of Québec’s national scenario by challenging familial roles and gendered subjectivities in a way that resonates the intent of Dolan’s cinema as well.” This is evident principally in the character of Francis, whose homophobic and misogynistic behaviour is also a disguise for the homosexual relationship he forces on with Tom (and also speaks to his implied incestuous relationship with Tom’s dead lover and Francis’ brother, Guy).

The film is filled with beautiful, evocative and uncomfortable imagery, particularly the way that Francis physically controls Tom to ensure he cannot leave the farm. Not only does Francis strand Tom by removing the tires from his car, he terrorizes and physically assaults Tom. The fascinating component is Tom’s Stockholm Syndrome infatuation with Francis: the interplay between sexual attraction and violence is repeatedly evident in situations such as when Francis wakes Tom up in bed, forces Tom into a bathroom stall, walks in on Tom in the shower, and leads Tom in a tango in the barn (Tom is, of course, dancing “the female” role).

Massimi sees the character as a proxy for Québec masculinity in the wake of the Quiet Revolution: “The homophobic, hyper-sexualized character of Francis epitomizes the dysfunctional male subject, who is produced…by the unsuccessful design of the Quiet Revolution…his sexual ambiguity and his submission to his controlling mother disclose[s] the failure of Québec’s nationalism to brand itself as a masculine project.” Sidebar: this is also in keeping with Fothergill’s characterization of the bully.

Which brings us back to the end of the film. Ballard notes that Dolan’s film features references and homages to US genre texts, including The Shining (the opening aerial) and several Hitchcock texts (the shower scene is Psycho and the corn chase is North by Northwest).

The USA denim jacket that Francis wears, then, is part of the film’s larger conversation about power and authority by a threatening “older brother” figure. Francis is representative of both the failure of the “masculine project” of the post-Quiet Revolution male in Québec, as well the province’s relationship to the larger Anglophone population in Canada, as well as Canada’s relationship to our neighbours to the South.

Sometimes the relationship is kind, romantic and reciprocal; others times it is regressive, repressed, and dangerous.

If the wardrobe isn’t enough, “Dolan chooses to end his film with Rufus Wainwright’s 2007 ‘Going to a Town’ (‘I’m going to a town that has already been burnt down/I’m so tired of you, America/Making my own way home, ain’t gonna be alone/I’ve got a life to lead, America’), a song very explicitly about Dolan’s fellow-gay-but-anglophone-Montrealer’s disillusionment with the United States and the Bush years” (Marshall).

The circularity of Tom at the Farm suggests that there’s no easy way to break free of an abusive relationship. After the funeral when Francis first beats him, Tom makes a futile attempt to drive off, but winds up circling back and returning to the farm. The film’s ambiguous ending also suggests that, despite finally returning to the safety of Montreal after weeks being held captive, Tom contemplates going back to Francis.*

*It should be noted that this is substantially different from the play, where Tom murders Francis and (it is implied that he) assumes the role of Agathe’s surrogate son.

Much like the politics of real life, there truly is no escaping the past.