Heartbeats (2010)

Heartbeats, or Les amours imaginaires, arrives from 2010 Montreal with Xavier Dolan writing, directing, editing, and casting himself as Francis, a young man undone by unrequited longing. The setup is a love triangle of unusual symmetry: Francis and his best friend Marie both fixate on the same beautiful, maddeningly ambivalent Nicolas, and the film tracks their parallel humiliations across coffee shops, dinner parties, and a country house weekend. That the protagonist is gay is not a subplot or a lesson. It is the architecture of the story, and Dolan, an openly gay filmmaker playing an openly gay character, treats the desire as ordinary and devastating in equal measure.

Marie, for her part, is a genuine co-lead with appetites and grievances of her own, which earns the film some credit for letting a woman want things badly and behave poorly about it. This is character writing, not advocacy. The cast remains uniformly white and the concerns remain resolutely romantic, so the film's social register stays narrow. There is no engagement with race, no environmental sermon, no indictment of wealth, no discourse on bodies or brains, and no attempt to revise the historical record. The characters are too busy staring at Nicolas to organize a movement.

Dolan's flourishes, the slow-motion confessions, the direct-to-camera monologues, the borrowed New Wave swagger, are deployed in service of heartbreak, not instruction. Nobody here delivers a thesis. The film is stylish, self-absorbed, and genuinely moving about the specific stupidity of wanting someone who does not want you back. For a viewer cataloguing the cultural priorities of 2010, it registers as a romantic drama with a gay center and little else on its mind. That restraint is its own quiet virtue, and it leaves the sommelier with a clean, uncomplicated pour: a wine with one clear note, no additives, and no aftertaste of sermonizing.

I have tasted worse. I have also tasted more interesting. This one is honest about what it is, which is rarer than it sounds, and I will not punish it for lacking ambitions it never claimed. The glass is emptied. The notebook is closed. The classification stands.

It is a small, sincere film about longing, and longing, at least in this vintage, requires no committee approval. I mark it accordingly and move on to the next bottle, which will almost certainly be louder and worse.

I will not be revisiting this one, but I will not be warning anyone away from it either. A rare neutrality. A critic's holiday. I take it where I can find it.

Let the record show this was a restrained affair, and restraint, in 2010, still counted for something.