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| Nico (Niels Schneider) in Heartbeats. |
Quazy Québécois kids
By Don Simpson
Francis (director Xavier Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri) are hyper-hip BFF’s who commence a fierce competition for the affections of the sexually ambiguous Nico (Niels Schneider). In turn, Nico knowingly or unknowingly (it's your call) taunts and teases the friends into a bitter high school-ish rivalry that eventually comes to physical blows.
Heartbeats is essentially about a threesome of trendy twenty-something Québécois hipsters with a unique flair for melodrama. All three characters are quite superficial in terms of their appearances (they are what they wear -- nothing more, nothing less) and attitudes towards others. Dolan’s penchant for slow-motion when photographing the leads clearly accentuates their beauty and elegance, yet reinforces that their beauty and elegance is all they have.
Francis co-opts the physical appearance (or, at least, the iconic hairstyle) of James Dean; Marie evolves into Audrey Hepburn (by way of Anna Karina); and Nico resembles a classic Greek Adonis, or a cross between a Jean Cocteau and Kenneth Anger lead. Nico exists purely as an object of lust, while Francis and Marie appear to be driven only by sex.
To counteract (or provide a Brechtian disruption for) the purely sexual tension, Dolan intersperses pseudo-documentary footage of female and male subjects describing their most obsessive loves. With these talking head interviews, Dolan is informing us that Francis and Marie are not the only two people who have become crazy while in the grasp of love. Sometimes Brechtian techniques work better than other times; in the case of Heartbeats, the interviews do not work at all. This is Dolan’s one amateurish flaw in Heartbeats.
Something I have noticed is that in comparison with the kind and beautiful male characters, Dolan’s females are cruel and calculating monsters. (Nico, being a straight male, is merely a dick tease.) Dolan’s gay males are not the stereotypically catty, spiteful and flamboyant queers we have grown to know and love via Hollywood; they are quite vulnerable, sympathetic and normal characters. He might be impeccably dressed with perfectly coiffed hair, but Francis is by no means flamboyant. For all intents and purposes, Francis could be a straight metrosexual hipster -- except we do occasionally see Francis in bed beside another male, and we know that he has a more than just friends infatuation with Nico (highlighted in the cleverly conceived masturbation scene). Basically, Dolan has discovered a way to normalize gay men, all the while demonizing straight women; but the jury is still out on straight men and lesbian women.
Dolan artistically crafts each and every scene of his sophomore feature with intensely colorful costume and production design. The party scene -- during which Dolan utilizes strobe lights to tremendous effect -- is a lot of fun to watch; while the monochromatically-gelled lighting of the bedroom scenes introduces a certain Kenneth Anger aesthetic to the film. First and foremost, though, are the slow-motion walking scenes (which is quickly becoming Dolan’s directorial signature) in which the actors’ wardrobes are always brilliantly juxtaposed against a colorful backdrop, all the while the soundtrack (which is often the de facto theme for Heartbeats, Dalida's “Bang Bang”) meshes perfectly with the movement.
(Heartbeats screens Jan. 14, 8 p.m., Palm Springs Regal 9; Jan. 16, 2 p.m., Palm Springs Regal 9. For more information: http://www.psfilmfest.org/)
