Unrequited obsession

Two films this week, one assiduously without heart, and one which may suffer from a surfeit, so you pays your money and takes your pick or you don’t pays your money and you stays in and has a jacket potato and watches TV.

Two films this week, one assiduously without heart, and one which may suffer from a surfeit, so you pays your money and takes your pick or you don’t pays your money and you stays in and has a jacket potato and watches TV. Makes no odds to me.

I’ll review in the order in which I saw them, as that seems only fair so, first, Heartbeats, which is so heartless it is almost daringly heartless, and although it did win the special youth prize at Cannes, I’m kind of thinking the youths can keep it. It’s a French-Canadian film, set in Montreal, and the second film from the startlingly precocious Xavier Dolan (his first was the prize-winning I Hate My Mother) who is still only 22, which is annoying, although perhaps not as annoying as the film itself. It’s about a pair of romantically infatuated twentysomethings and while I have nothing against infatuated twentysomethings per se, how long do I want to be in the same room with them? No time at all, it turns out.

Our pair are Marie (Monia Chokri), a chilly, chain-smoking intellectual who dresses affectedly in ‘vintage’ clothing, and her gay bestie, Francis (played by Dolan himself), an Emo fond of wallowing in dejection. At a dinner party, they encounter Nicolas (Niels Schneider), who is pretty beneath his corona of blond, bouncy curls — ‘Who is that Adonis?’ asks Marie, lingeringly — and both are instantly besotted. Marie and Francis then spend the rest of the film slyly trying to woo him as their own relationship becomes increasingly competitive.