In his second feature film, Xavier Dolan, darling of Cannes as director of I Killed My Mother (J’ai tué ma mére) that won three prizes at the 2009 Directors’ Fortnight, wears his heart on his sleeve nearly as baldly as his protagonists wear their own. Dolan’s love for telling stories on film marries confident visuals and earnest dialogue to capture perfectly the emotional turmoil of love—possibly requited, maybe could be requited... No, definitely unrequited love.
Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires) is a film of young love, the love that we’re told (and might convince ourselves of) wasn’t love at all, but was infatuation, merely a passing crush or physical desire. And while that may very well be the case, such knowledge does little to lessen the intensity of the emotion, to soften the cruelty of rejection’s blow. Heartbeats opens with an epigraph from Alfred de Musset, Georges Sand’s former lover and an early Romantic poet. Il n’y a de vrai au monde que de déraisonner d’amour: “The only truth is love beyond reason.” Love finds comfort in its illogic, follows the heart’s impulses and flies in the face of the brain's more reasonable directives. His choice of signature song is flawless, and Dalinda’s “Bang Bang” follows characters through every teasing step away from reason and deeper into love’s truth.
The film follows stylish best friends Marie (Monia Chokri) and Francis (Dolan) as they encounter, pursue, fall for, pine over, are ditched by, and recover from Nicolas (Niels Schneider). All are young and beautiful, their lives filled with late night dance parties, discussions of theatre and literary criticism, blasé sexual encounters, and packs and packs of cigarettes. Marie wears her nonchalance like an accessory to her vintage dresses, chain smoking while appraising and assessing all who surround her. Aptly characterizing Nicolas as a “self-satisfied Adonis,” Marie nonetheless can’t help falling, followed by (or following) Francis, whose need for love is more clearly revealed by his fresh face, open desire, and running tally of rejections.
Their fall is captured in lovely slow-motion, and we watch it like a car wreck, hoping for consummation but knowing that they are being teased, destined for abandonment. Each arranges accidental encounters, buys “spontaneous” gifts, shares the bed without daring to make a move. The film frames them carefully, stage actors prepping for an important performance. Scenes are often color saturated, and the film makes careful and limited use of special effects and long shots. As tension mounts and the ménage à trois loses its precarious balance, friends easily become rivals, literally coming to fisticuffs over their objet d’amour.
Nicolas’s motives seem to stem from simply accepting adoration and petting as his birthright. We see this reinforced by his mother’s fawning at his birthday party— a sexy former adult dancer, she pets and favors Nicolas like any of his younger devotees. It’s not even clear if he is consciously toying with the friends or if he is so accustomed to such adulation that it never occurs to him to take it seriously. But when he removes himself from a situation that has lost its fun, Marie and Francis become increasingly desperate to recapture his attention, and Nicolas heartless rejections reveal his callous nature.
Neither Francis nor Marie can resist the final humiliation, and each confession of love is crushed heartlessly by Nicolas. Francis’s profession is particularly aching, long and heartfelt only to be met by Nicolas's homophobic dismissal: “How could you think I was gay?” Marie, true to her reserve, is a bit more cagey, pretending to have mis-sent a Musset poem but cannot recover from his clear brush-off.
Dolan claims to come late to film, and he draws from an international registrar of influences—Pedro Almodovar, Wong Kar-Wai, François Truffaut are easily spotted as influences. Shot in a fairly straightforward manner, the film frames characters tightly, doing so to highlight their narcissism rather than their introspection. Dolan says of his characters: “There’s no depth—they are literally in love with themselves through the eyes of a beautiful man. And it would be great if he could love them... They are choosing an impossible target so they won’t have to get involved in real things. They’re very romantic, but at some point the reason why there aren’t any crying scenes is because it’s a very banal love story.” And they don’t learn, the film ending with their sizing up of the next crush, a year later and older, but hardly any wiser.
