Heartbeats, the Sexiest Movie of the Year
by Dan Callahan
Directed by Xavier Dolan
"The only truth is love beyond reason," reads the opening title of Xavier Dolan's second movie as director-writer-actor, Heartbeats, but the dreamy narrative that unfolds between Francis (Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri) and their object of desire Nicolas (Niels Schneider) proves that young love is really just desire that refuses all reason. Dolan has moved past the more monochromatic palette of his first autobiographical film,I Killed My Mother, and into the 1960s-like pleasure of primary colors; more than half of the movie is set in slow motion, so that we can watch the beauty, the yearning and the butterfly-pinned-to-a-corkboard awkwardness of Francis and Marie as they vie for Nicolas's affection. Interspersed throughout are interviews with women and a few men about their love lives, and these talking heads provide a striking counterpoint to the lingering shots set to music of Francis trying to buy Nicolas's love, or Marie attempting to look like Audrey Hepburn because the much-loved Audrey is Nicholas's favorite actress. As a performer, Dolan is a frisky, destabilizing presence in his own French New Wave-ish frames, and his writing can be very funny; when Marie's neglected lover asks how she liked their last sexual encounter, she says that it was "engrossing," her face a force field of deadpan intellectual precision. As a director, Dolan maintains a balancing act between honest emotion, smart deflection of that emotion, and the kind of cinema savvy that can save a cameo appearance by a well-known actor as a perfect movie-mad grace note. The total effect of Heartbeats is one of senses-enhancing eroticism, and surely there won't be a sexier movie released this year.
Opens February 25
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