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Movie Review: Heartbeats

Gregory Fichter

“It’s not real…it’s the concept you love.” So says one of the faux interview subjects in an opening montage of accounts of failed love which sets off the second film from the very young and full of potential French-Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan. Heartbeats (original title Love, Imagined or Les amours imaginaires) centers on the love triangle between three ultra-hip denizens of Quebec who all seem like they have a different French New Wave movie playing in their heads. It’s all terribly stylish and indebted to numerous other films, but it is clearly the efforts of a still naïve, moony sort of Romantic storyteller.

At a house party, Francis (played by the pompadour-sporting director Dolan) and his best friend Marie (Monia Chokri) lay their sights on new kid in town Nicolas (Niels Schneider): “a self-satisfied Adonis” by Marie’s estimation. Both are immediately infatuated with Nicolas’ classic Greek beauty and quickly strike up a close bond with him over their mutual love of retro cool (Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, vintage fashions, etc.). The cinematic techniques employed by Dolan also reveal his fetish for the old masters, like the lengthy slow-motion tracking shots of Marie sashaying down the street to a French version of Sonny & Cher’s “(Bang Bang) My Baby Shot Me Down” or in general winks in the direction of gay film icons Jean Cocteau, Kenneth Anger, and Jean Genet. Though there is little substance to the style, Dolan should be given a pass on his aesthetic pretensions because it feels true to the feeling one has when falling in youthful love that they are the first ones to discover such methods of artistic description.

There is no war looming (as in Jules and Jim) and no intimations of mortality (like the old man coveting a young man’s youth in Death in Venice), instead Heartbeats is told in a series of inconsequential vignettes, slowly leading to a rift in Marie and Francis’ friendship with some interesting side-notes into the embarrassing lengths one will go to when trying to win another’s favor. In bed with other convenient partners, both Marie and Francis reveal themselves to be self-absorbed and ponderous (appearing much older than the boys, Marie strikes me as especially brittle and ill-suited in her pursuit of a younger man with little in common besides the superficial). Francis keeping a prison-like tally on his bathroom wall of all of his rejections is less poetic and more mundane than the filmmaker intends.

Though it falters in its attempts to be profound, the film does successfully maintain a tone of comedic bemusement, such as Marie’s fed-up responses every time Francis seems to favor her rival or her terse, profane review after seeing a bad play. In comedic scenes like this that come from a place of frustration and desperation, Dolan mines the character’s discomfort for some very funny moments. An extended scene of Francis’ self-pleasuring being interrupted by a whirlwind visit from Nicolas’ brazen mother in which he does his best to be both polite and move her along so he can get back to “business” achieves a tricky balance of hilarious and pathetic that characterizes the film’s other successful sequences.

Less intriguing are the sub-Eric Rohmer forays into pastoral comedy near the end of the picture when the three leads take a trip to the countryside and Marie finally gives up on her pursuit. Nicolas, at first the ideal of oblivious charm, reveals himself as more manipulative and self-aware than he lets on (he seems to poke at his friend’s stalker-ish behavior when he sings The Police song “Every Breath You Take” to himself but really to them). When tensions boil over into a scrap between Marie and Francis, Nicolas appears to relish the drama rather than break it up with a little forthrightness.

By making all of his characters less-than-desirable, Xavier Dolan fails in making you care what happens to any of them. His best insights into the morass of modern relationships come in the interview segments with people who otherwise do not appear in the film. We would like to follow some of these people and find out if they have more going on than preening and self-loathing. The final scene of Heartbeats does reach a sort of immature catharsis, but a cameo appearance from French film star Louis Garrel only serves to remind us that there are much more rewarding examples of this material to be found in new French cinema (see Christophe Honore’s Dan Paris (2006) or Philippe Garrel’s lustrous Regular Lovers (2005). Give Xavier Dolan time to escape the pressures of film critics dubbing him a wunderkind to find a voice that really has something to say since the polished techniques already seem second nature to this budding talent.

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Gregory Fichter

Greg toiled for years in the hallowed bowels of the legendary Thomas Video and has studied cinema as part of the Concentration for Film Studies and Aesthetics at Oakland University. He has hosted the cult movie night "Celluloid Sundays" at The Belmont in Hamtramck, MI. and enjoys everything from High Trash to Low Art.

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