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Movie review: 'Heartbeats,' 2.5 stars
Heartbeats
2.5 stars
Written and directed by Xavier Dolan
Starring Xavier Dolan, Monia Chokri, Niels Schneider
Rated R“Heartbeats,” set in Montreal, has Frenchness in its soul.
The film pays beautiful, self-conscious tribute to some of the visual tropes and fourth-wall-shattering storytelling techniques that characterized the French New Wave, the period during the 1960s in which filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut modernized cinema.
“Heartbeats” aspires to incorporate those devices in its deconstruction of the free-flowing sexuality and complex intersection of love and lust that characterizes millennial romance.
Yet the second feature-film effort of 21-year-old director Xavier Dolan comes across as a rather insipid, empty affair.
In telling the story of three gorgeous twenty-somethings — two of whom (played by Dolan and Monia Chokri) fight for the affections of the third (Niels Schneider) — the filmmaker offers no probing or lasting insights into their strained connections.
Instead, Dolan seems content to center his film on one slow-motion montage after another, falsely presuming that his audience would settle for the on-screen beauty without wanting more.The actors are submerged in a layer of artifice so thick that it’s impossible to regard the characters as anything but pawns in the writer-director’s cinematic game. Similarly, the movie — while full of visual pleasures — never quite shakes the sense that it is a full-length perfume ad masquerading as something more.
Playing at IFC Center
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