Xavier Dolan | Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm) / 2013

i’m so tired of america

by Douglas Messerli

 

Xavier Dolan and Michel Marc Bouchard (screenplay, based on the play by Bouchard), Xavier Dolan (director) Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm) / 2013

This truly wonderful film is nearly impossible to watch if you are gay and have any empathy for others. I suffered through the film with tears.

      Tom Podowski (powerfully performed by director Dolan himself), a Canadian, has lost his lover Guillaume, and returns back to the farm where his body has been taken. This is somewhat reminiscent of A Single Man, where the former gay lover is not invited or wanted at the funeral of the man he has loved and lived with for years; except in this case the dead boy’s mother Agathe Longchamp (Lise Roy) has had no idea that her son was gay. Tom’s sudden appearance, however, immediately arouses the homophobic hate of the dead boy’s brother Francis (Pierre-Yves Cardinal), who quickly recognizes that this is his dead brother’s lover who intends to deliver a eulogy which might reveal his own love and bereavement for his former lover.

     Francis violently threatens Tom against delivering any expression of love so that he might protect his mother, who quite blindly believes her dead son was in love with a woman, who she is surprised she has not attended the funeral. And Tom gives in, refusing to deliver the eulogy with a lame excuse that he was dissatisfied with the quality of his writing. He is ready to leave, but is again forced by Francis to stay on the farm for a few days just to satisfy his mother Agathe, who he also admits is becoming somewhat dotty and will, as soon as he can, send off to a nursing home.

      What follows is a true psychological horror film, wherein Tom is suddenly confined to the farm, while also recognizing that the handsome farmer Francis, despite his homophobia, is attracted to him.

      One might describe Tom as rather naïve, and he engages in a frightful game of attempting to become part of the Longchamp family, Agathe so happy he has decided to stay on, and joyful in his presence. Tom, in fact, is trapped into remaining, helping in the birth of a new calve, milking and mucking up the place, and in the process actually discovering it a kind of source to become closer to his former lover.

      He eventually reads his eulogy to Agathe, pretending it is from the female lover of Guillaume, Sarah (Evelyne Brochu), although it is his love poem to her son. But the mother is delighted that at least the missing girlfriend has written.

    And there is a moment when Francis actually dances a tango with Tom when you think he might admit that he truly desires his brother’s lover. And we come to realize that, in fact, Francis was in love with his younger brother. Even Agathe comments that seeing the two men in the bedroom together she has reimagined the days of her son’s sharing a room, a joy to her, perhaps a terror of memories for the now homophobic Francis.

      But gradually, particularly when Tom invites a friend to impersonate Sarah, and arrives to explain why she wasn’t at the funeral, the real horror story begins to unweave. The friend actually confesses to him that she too has had sex with his former lover Guillaume, as had many others. And she is only too ready to make have sex with Francis, the couple ordering Tom out of the car.

      In a local bar into which he retreats, he asks the barman (Manuel Tadros) why Francis is not allowed into the bar and is told the horrible story from years before when a young man had told Francis that his brother was queer. Apparently he tore is mouth apart, the man surviving after surgery now working in a nearby city.

       After having now completely destroyed Tom’s car by removing its wheels and hoisting it up into a farm garage, Tom finally determines to escape, rushing as before he did through the sharp cornfields, this time into a woods, chased down by Francis, determined to destroy him for his attempt to express the truth of his life. But Tom runs back to the road, steals Francis’ car and drives off. As he stops by a gas station he spots a young man scarred on both sides of his mouth just as the barman described the brutal Francis’ actions.

      The final song, as Tom returns to Montreal, reveals another terribly brutal truth, particularly in these Trump days, that, in fact, the farm Tom has visited is in the USA, as we see Francis dressed in a USA coat, with the movie ends with Rufus Wainwright’s plaintive lyrics, “Going to a Town”:

 

I'm going to a town that has already been burnt down

I'm going to a place that has already been disgraced

I'm gonna see some folks who have already been let down

I'm so tired of America

 

I'm gonna make it up for all of The Sunday Times

I'm gonna make it up for all of the nursery rhymes

They never really seem to want to tell the truth

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

I've got a life to lead.

 

Tell me, do you really think you go to hell for having loved

Tell me, enough of thinking everything that you've done is good

I really need to know, after soaking the body of Jesus Christ in blood

I'm so tired of America.

    Today, many of us feel like Tom, ready to escape the dark lies of US living impossible to assimilate.

 

Los Angeles, April 19, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2025).