Matthias & Maxime

Matthias and Maxime have been close friends since childhood, but their lives are heading in different directions. Matthias is settling into a stable professional life and preparing to start a family, while Maxime is planning to leave for Australia in search of a fresh start. At a farewell gathering, someone asks the two men to kiss as part of a short film being shot for a university project. The kiss itself seems trivial at the time, yet it lingers in both men's minds, stirring questions about their own desires and unsettling the balance of the group of friends around them.

Xavier Dolan directed and wrote the film, which was produced by Nathanaël Karmitz, Dolan and Nancy Grant. It is Dolan's eighth feature, arriving after It's Only the End of the World and before The Death & Life of John F. Donovan in the chronological list of his directing work. Gabriel D'Almeida Freitas plays Matthias and Dolan himself plays Maxime, alongside Pier-Luc Funk, Samuel Gauthier, Antoine Pilon and Adib Alkhalidey among a credited cast of 36.

The film runs 120 minutes and was released in October 2019. It holds a rating of 6.8 from around 10,000 votes on IMDb, compared with 7.1 from roughly 500 votes on TMDB, while its critics' rating stands at 6.5 from 76 reviews. The audience scores sit somewhat above the critical one, with the larger IMDb sample showing more reserved approval than the smaller TMDB group.