Heartbeats (2010)
Directed by Xavier Dolan
Francis is a young gay man, Marie is a young straight woman and the two of them are best friends -- until the day the gorgeous Nicolas walks into a Montreal coffee shop. The two friends, instantly and equally infatuated, compete for Nicolas' indeterminate affections, a conflict that climaxes when the trio visit the vacation home of Nicolas' mother. The frothy comedy unfolds through narrative, fantasy sequences and confessional monologues.
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What critics compared Heartbeats to
The blond, beautiful, made-for-a-fairy-tale Valerie (Amanda Seyfried), the grieving younger sister of the slain village girl, throws back a mug of mead for courage and makes eyes at a boy who is not her fiancé before stealing away with him to literally roll in the hay (as said fiancé secretly looks on) to the sound of Karin Dreijer Andersson singing “Keep the Streets Empty for Me,” a track which was also used recently in Xavier Dolan’s Heartbeats during another poignant scene illustrating the drama produced by love triangles.
The main trio in “Mommy” — like the protagonists in Dolan’s “Heartbeats” and “Laurence Anyways” — take a brief respite inside their own cloistered mini-community, even if it’s bound to burst apart and re-expose them to the disarray of the real world.
Though scarcely known in the States, where his sophomore feature “Heartbeats” earned just shy of $600,000, and “I Killed My Mother” and the gender-resistant romance “Laurence Anyways” received only minor arthouse releases, Dolan exploded on the international festival scene in 2009 with a textbook case of “therapy through filmmaking.”
Quebec-based actress Dorval, veteran of Dolan's similarly strenuous Heartbeats and I Killed My Mother, comes within an inch of destroying the entire movie but always pulls back.
Each of Dolan's previous efforts (I Killed My Mother, Heartbeats, Laurence Anyways and Tom at the Farm ) have received immense critical acclaim.
A bold move, but also a loud formal conceit that limits the creativity of a director who’s found interesting framing and performance in the past with Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways.