dvd of the week
It’s a tale as old as time: A young gay man and his best girlfriend fall in love with the same beautiful boy. This plot and its lesbian equivalent have been at the center of entirely too many bad independent films. So, you might expect that Heartbeats, a film about such a topic made by a near-juvenile, a 21-year-old gay man, would be shallow, clichéd and even grating. You would be wrong. Writer-director Xavier Dolan plays Francis and Monia Chokri plays Marie, two Montreal hipsters who fall madly in love with Niels Schneider’s Nicolas, a college student who looks like a less buff version of Michelangelo’s David. Dolan’s direction is enormously stylized, with rich, almost Fauvist colors, and camera shots framed so carefully that any film still could be mounted and hung in a museum. But, to me, it never feels pretentious. While some directors use that kind of beauty arrogantly and without thought to its dramatic effect (Michael Bay, for example), Dolan manages to make this kind of direction emotionally encompassing, even sublime. Slow motion shots of Marie chain-smoking or Francis crying, underscored by French pop songs, are the visual equivalent of emotional angst that 10th grade love poetry always fails to connote.
