Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires)

Overview

You always want to hate a movie that's made by someone younger than you, and at just-gone 22, Xavier Dolan is almost certainly younger than you. To add further insult to injury, this is already his second feature, and it took out last year's top Sydney Film Festival prize after premiering at Cannes. He also very ably stars in this film and appears to be a sharp dresser, damn him.

Worst of all, Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires) is good. It is true art house that triumphs by playing with pretension and never taking itself too seriously. The film's best scenes are joyously bizarre, and the mirror it holds up to indie culture presents the opportunity to do more than coif one's hair.

Heartbeats follows Marie (Monia Chokri) and Francis (Dolan), best friends bearing all the hallmarks of hipsters, as their friendship is tested by the arrival of beguiling, blond-curled Nicolas (Niels Schneider). Both become infatuated with the lazily lovely lad and think the other the meddling third wheel in the relationship, while Nicolas throws out few hints as to where his actual favour lies.

The film's longing stares and struts are drawn out into slow motion, the preparation for a shootout over further than ten paces, and it works to heighten the mood of the supercharged, emotive subject. The languorous, colour- and music-saturated shots are reminiscent of Wong Kar-Wai and the set-ups hark back to French New Wave, but Dolan isn't cribbing; his visual style is distinctive enough to signal if not the arrival, then the making of an auteur. He may be next year's Pedro Almodovar or Michel Gondry, and you'll want to say you saw him first.