Heartbeats
Young Québécois actor Xavier Dolan’s second
film as director, Heartbeats, is an assured and confident film that knows exactly what it wants
to be and achieves it. He’s only 22. This is a wonderful film that captures a
certain kind of precocious youth, indebted to the past in ways that heighten
instead of dampen volatile youthful emotion in the present. A perfectly
romantic atmosphere cribbed in part from Wong Kar Wai, and a muted Gregg Araki
mixed with a French New Wave flavor, is here deployed in an agonizingly
tantalizing story of one-sided infatuation. It's about a love triangle of sorts
in which a gay man (Dolan) and his best girl friend (Monia Chokri) are both
crushing on the same cute guy (Niels Schneider), but said crush object doesn’t
seem to know it, or worse, knows it and is toying with them. The film follows
the three characters as they circle each other, charting their small shifts,
their cyclical emotional and physical attempts to draw closer, and the moody
currents that drift them apart. However thin the plot is, Dolan, a terrifically
promising director and a great screen presence, fills up the empty spaces with
delirious style and a thick mood aching with emotions and impulses. This is a
film about the romantic charge of absence, especially when mixed with the
slight possibility, however impossible despite physical proximity, of
attainment. Dolan has made his film in a bold style that’s as fresh as it is
referential. It’s style as substance.
Potiche
About as pink and bubbly as a film can get without a physical problem
with the print, François Ozon’s Potiche
is a 1970’s period-piece women’s empowerment farce (both aspects are given
their progressive expressions) that struggles but never quite collapses under
the weight of its soap-opera elements. It’s a light confection through which
some hugely talented French stars (no less than Catherine Deneuve among them)
stride. Deneuve plays a stylish trophy wife who we first meet out for her
morning jog decked out in pink athletic wear, moving at a pace that still
allows her to admire all of the animals in the forest. Her husband (Fabrice
Luchini) is the stingy, adulterous owner of a nearby umbrella factory who,
after his striking employees confront him, collapses with a heart condition.
This leaves his wife to shake off her trophy status and take charge at the
company. Her new position creates differing reactions from their adult kids
(Jérémie Renier and Judith Godrèche) and the factory’s secretary (Karin Viard)
and brings her into contact with an old flame (Gérard Depardieu), all of which
kicks off a narrative of self-discovery and a journey to fulfillment. Her story
is wrapped inside a bright, light, farcical comedy and the film goes down
happily and humorously.
The Princess of Montpensier
I feel compelled to call Bertrand Tavernier’s latest film, The Princess of Montpensier, based on a
1662 novel from Madame de Lafayette, lengthy. Despite the fact that I
thoroughly enjoyed every minute, this is a film that feels long simply because it’s
so tightly packed and richly spun. If anything, it’s surprising that it fits as
much as it does in only 140 minutes. At times, Tavernier makes use of elisions
in cutting between scenes, withholding information, allowing the audience to
fill in gaps left by events and decisions unseen. In this way, the plot expands
past the boundaries of screen time and feels richer for it. The film is a
large-scale epic with terrific, muted melodrama played out against the backdrop
of 16th century war between the Catholics and the Huguenots and the smaller,
but no less important, scale of arranged marriages, true love, and broken
hearts amongst dukes and duchesses and the children thereof. This particular
story pivots upon Count de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), who we meet in the
opening scene in the heat of battle, a fight that causes him to lay down his
arms and take up pacifism. This eventually leads him to the home of the Prince
of Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), who asks him to help tutor his new
wife, Marie (Mélanie Thierry), so that she may be presentable when the time
comes that she must appear before the royal court. Marie, the titular princess,
becomes the other major figure in the film. We first meet her before the
wedding, flirting with the dashing Duke de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel). She loves
him, but her father (Philippe Magnan) is persuaded by the elder Montpensier (Michel
Vuillermoz) that his marriage proposal is most beneficial. And so, Marie
becomes Princess of Montpensier while her heart still belongs to another. As
the film unfolds, the characters are held captive by and rebel against the
social constraints of their stations, struggling to assert or ignore their
desires while submitting to sociopolitical and religious inevitabilities. Excellent
acting across the board animates this handsomely gorgeous and refreshingly
steady and restrained film of convincing period detail, complicated political
intrigue, and piercing emotion. I found it a full and compelling experience.
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