Laurence Anyways (2012)

Xavier Dolan's 2012 epic runs three hours, and it spends most of that time on a single impossible love. Laurence, a Montreal literature teacher and novelist, tells Fred on her birthday that she is a woman. Fred recoils, then returns, then teaches her girlfriend how to apply makeup and buys her a wig. The film won the Queer Palm at Cannes, and the designation is not a courtesy. This is a foundational text of trans cinema, and it places a trans woman's transition at the center of a sweeping romantic melodrama. The casting of Melvil Poupaud in the leading role, a cisgender actor, reads differently now than it did in 2012. The film cannot resolve that tension from inside itself.

Elsewhere the film is free of the markers we have learned to inventory. Race goes unmentioned. So does the climate. The school board that fires Laurence for arriving in a dress delivers a social wound, not an economic argument, and no critique of capital follows. Body positivity, neurodivergence, and any reframing of recorded history are absent. Feminism appears in flashes: Fred's quiet decision to end a pregnancy, her stalled career, her insistence on her own terms. Those are gestures, not a program. Dolan's method is emotional rather than argumentative, and the result is a film that shows far more than it lectures.

What remains is the ache. Fred's devotion curdles into depression and she leaves. Laurence stalks her from a parked car outside a house in Trois-Rivières. A book of poems carries a coded message. A reunion on the Isle of Black collapses into accusation, and a marriage falls apart in the wreckage. Dolan shoots all of this with operatic sincerity, and the sincerity is the point. The film's progressive content is genuine, but it lives inside a melodrama, not a manifesto. Its politics arrive as weather. We are left with two people who love each other badly and at length, and a director more interested in breaking hearts than in instructing them.