Les Amours imaginaires (2010)
Directed by Xavier Dolan

Film Review

Proving that he is anything but a one-hit wonder, French-Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan followed up his acclaimed debut feature J'ai tué ma mère (2009) with a film that is even more astonishing, all the more so when you realise that Dolan was just 21 when he made it.  Les Amours imaginaires is framed around the classic love triangle - a kind of kitsch homage to Truffaut's Jules et Jim if you reckon that the main inspiration for Dolan's first film was Truffaut's Les 400 coups - except that here a boy and girl end up fighting over the same boy.  With influences that range from Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers (2003) to Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love (2000), via virtually the entire output of the French New Wave, Dolan's second cinematic extravaganza is a mesmerising visual poem that both celebrates and mourns the power of romantic desire, the florid exuberance of its mise-en-scène subtly soiled by the skidmarks of cynicism that lie beneath.

Apparently uninhibited by the self-restraint and self-consciousness that would limit the creativity of a more experienced filmmaker, Xavier Dolan brings to his art an undiluted potency that can be overwhelming but also exhilarating.  The extreme artifice that abounds in his second film, including liberal use of slow-motion, bright-coloured filters and bizarre dream-like flights of fancy, with musical accompaniment ranging from Wagner to Dalida, makes this feel like a Pedro Almodóvar film in a dangerously concentrated form, but there is within this surfeit of stylish excess a raging furnace of authenticity.  Les Amours imaginaires may be dizzyingly, and sometimes off-puttingly, flamboyant but it is a film with a powerful emotional resonance, as it touches on something we have all experienced, the delusion of love and the pain of rejection.  What is most remarkable about Dolan is not his prodigious creative talent, nor the ease with which he has established himself as one of the most formidable film auteurs of our time, but his sensitivity and perceptiveness, qualities which allow him to seize what is in the human heart and project it onto the screen in a way that anyone who sees it will at once recognise it as a fundamental truth about ourselves.

As in his first feature, Dolan not only directed, wrote, produced and designed the film he also takes one of the principal roles, forming a charismatic triumvirate of acting talent with Niels Schneider and Monia Chokri.  If Dolan shamelessly models his appearance and mannerisms on James Dean (one of his personal icons), Chokri is a nod towards Audrey Hepburn and Schneider a dead-ringer for Martin Potter in Fellini's Satyricon.  As the mythical object of desire or homme fatal, Schneider doesn't have much to do other than look suitably aloof and gorgeous, but he plays with his character's sexual ambiguity brilliantly and provides an enigmatic marble centrepiece around which Dolan and Chokri drool like demented animals, pathetically consumed by a desire that will drive them to the limits of sanity.  Periodically, faux documentary inserts gatecrash the main narrative to show a diverse cavalcade of young people raking over their past amorous disappointments, in a darkly comedic vein.

It takes a while but the quote from the French poet Alfred de Musset which is flashed up at the start of the film finally makes sense.  "Il n'y a de vrai au monde que de déraisonner d'amour" which roughly translates as "there is no greater truth in our world than love without reason".  The moment that Schneider's indifference for his obsessive admirers crystallises into outright rejection the desolation that suddenly pours over Dolan and Chokri is so intense that we feel it as keenly as a slap on the face.  Les Amours imaginaires is a sugar-coated fantasy with the most rancid interior - a film that seeps into your consciousness like treacle and then gradually sets into something hard and nasty.  Don't be deceived by Xavier Dolan's youth and exuberance.  He knows exactly what makes us tick and how to employ this knowledge in his art to reveal our true nature to us.  It is perhaps with anticipation tempered with foreboding that we should await the revelations he has in store for us...

Film Synopsis

Francis and Marie are two close friends, both in their mid-twenties, who cannot help falling in love with the same man, Nicolas.  As Nicolas is in no hurry to disclose his sexual preference he gladly accepts favours from both of his admirers and they each begin to imagine that he is Mr Right.  Francis and Marie's friendship comes under strain when they each realise they are competing for the same life partner but neither succeeds in making Nicolas his or her own exclusive property.  When Francis and Marie make clear their feelings for him Nicolas has no choice but to tell them the truth, and ends up breaking both their hearts...