Heartbeats/Les Amours Imaginaires (2010) - Dolan's second is the year's guilty pleasure #1

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1 Film Excess nomination:

Best Costumes: Xavier Dolan (lost to Pat Field for Sex and the City 2)

+ Best Canadian Movie of the Year
+ Best Youth Movie of the Year
+ Sexiest Movie of the Year

Xavier Dolan looks enamored and slightly annoyed, perhaps at being enamored, on the poster for his own Heartbeats

Two good, fashionable friends get a new friend, whom they both fall in love with and idealize, while he manipulates them.

Heartbeats, with the original French title Les Amours Imaginaires (which translates to 'the imaginary loves'), is the second feature from Canadian master writer-director Xavier Dolan (Mommy (2014)). It presents a story that seems ideal for a short film, which is then stretched to feature length. It thus comes off as a very light but also delightfully tender and elegant film of the little unhappy romances in life, and especially the ones that primarily remain fanciful.
Niels Schneider (Opium (2013)) is good as the favored Adonis, whose casual cat-and-mouse game with the two enamored 'friends' annoys me to the point where I just want to scratch his eyes out. Dolan himself is dreamy as the wildly frustrated Francis, and Monia Chokri (All Yours/Je Suis à Toi (2014)) is also divine, (although she smokes too much) as the equally frustrated Marie. They are a damn sexy trio.
The film can seem almost superficial due to its hyper-aestheticism (the neat cinematography is by Stéphanie Anne Weber Biron (I Killed My Mother/J'ai Tué Ma Mère (2009))) and thematical lightness, so it feels like a guilty pleasure still to dig Heartbeats in a big way. It employs the element of having younger people unrelated to the story discuss their love lives to the camera, which works for the most part, (and lengthens the film, which may have been the main reason for incorporating it.) Dolan has, as he likes to do, picked out the stylish costumes for the film himself.
Heartbeats is a sensuous, deliciously sounding style-soup of a film to savor, and I have enjoyed watching it several times.

Related posts:


Xavier Dolan:  2014 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]   
Mommy (2014) - Dolan has outdone himself and orchestrated the (probably) best film of the year
Tom at the Farm/Tom à la Ferme (2013) - Intense, eerie sub/dom-themed sex thriller (without sex)
Laurence Anyways (2012) - Dolan serves a stylish, jumbled, massive transsexualism tale 
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED III]
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED II]
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED I]
2010 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess

Watch a trailer for the film here

Cost: Approximately 595k $
Box office: 588k $
= Big flop
[Heartbeats premiered May 16 (Cannes) and runs 101 minutes. It was made on a small budget and premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes Film Festival. In the US, the film opened to a 7k $ first weekend in a single theater, widening to 10 theaters at its biggest, grossing 68k $ (11.6 % of the total gross). Its biggest markets were France/Canada with 411k $ (69.9 %) and Germany with 159k $ (27 %). The film played at various festivals and won the Sydney Film Festival's Best Film award. Heartbeats is certified fresh at 73 % with a 6.9 critical average on Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of Heartbeats?

Laurence Anyways (2012) - First Dolan blunder is an epic-length drag

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Immersive and stylish, the blushing poster for Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways

Laurence and his girlfriend Fred are madly in love, when he confides to her that he is a transsexual, and that he wants to become a woman. In the following years, Laurence accordingly changes his identity, but SPOILER loses his job and Fred.

Laurence features bold acting, and both leads give themselves 100 %: Melvin Poupard (A Summer's Tale (1996)) and Suzanne Clément (Mommy (2014)), who is especially emotional throughout, - overly so, in fact, as continual huffing, puffing, screaming and crying ultimately alienates.
The two fight a lot in the film, and French-Canadian writer-director whiz-kid Xavier Dolan (I Killed My Mother (2009)) holds his scenes for long, - sometimes for so long that I lost my sense of the film's structure. - Which is too long.
Laurence offers beautiful episodes and lovely music choices (Cyndi Lauper, Visage and The Cure among others) and true panache for the 1980's period in which it takes place, especially in an incredible party scene.
Transsexualism is a difficult subject for a film, and Laurence Anyways will possibly appeal most to real-life transsexuals. The film seems self-indulgent (with a 161 minute playtime) and searching in an incomplete sort of way. Furthermore, I didn't understand the ending: Did Laurence not change everything to live as he wanted, - SPOILER but then only to return to be male for Fred again?!?
Laurence Anyways is Dolan's first weak film.

Watch the trailer for Laurence Anyways with English subtitles here

Cost: Unknown
Box office: Unknown
= Uncertainty
[Produced by French MK2 Productions and Canadian Lyla Films, Laurence received acclaim at Cannes 2012, where Clément won Un Certain Regard Best Actress, and the film also won the Queer Palm Award and later for Best Canadian Feature at the 2012 Toronto Film Festival. Its cost and box office results are unreported.]

What do you think of Laurence Anyways?
Other film/s about being a transsexual that you want to recommend?