Heartbeats – review

HeartbeatsProduction year: 2010Countries: Canada, Rest of the world Cert (UK): 15Runtime: 95 minsDirectors: Xavier DolanCast: Monia Chokri, Niels Schneider, Xavier DolanMore on this film

This wispy French-Canadian comedy has an epigraph by Alfred de Musset: "The only truth is love beyond reason." It's mostly about what strange magic attracts members of the same sex and opposite sexes to each other, usually reluctantly and rarely happily. The articulate characters, all well-heeled students in Montreal, discuss it over coffee and across the dinner table. Marie, the heroine, talks about it post-coitally with a succession of boyfriends, and she becomes part of a triangle. The other members of the chaste ménage are her best friend Francis, a somewhat callow gay man (played by the film's talented young writer-director, Xavier Dolan), and the androgynous Nicolas, whom someone calls an Adonis. Together they make up a Jules et Jim trio, but with the narcissistic Nicolas as the obscure object of the others' desire. The style is nouvelle vague but more Godard than Truffaut, and it's likeable enough, though there's far too much slow motion.

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