Laurence Anyways (Breaking Glass Pictures, NR)

The ending is surprisingly affecting, and it played well in my memory long after having seen it.

Do you know about Xavier Dolan? I hope you do. At the time of this writing, he is a 24-year-old French-Canadian who just completed his fourth feature film, Tom at the Farm, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last month. His first three films, 2009’s I Killed My Mother, 2010’s Heartbeats, and 2012’s Laurence Anyways all premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. I Killed My Mother is of interest, and Heartbeats and Laurence Anyways are rather strong films. After a brief theatrical run in the U.S., Laurence Anyways is being released on DVD and Blu-ray from Breaking Glass Pictures.

Laurence Anyways is a nearly three-hour film about a character with gender dysphoria. This is Laurence Alia (Melvil Poupaud), who we come into acquaintance with in the beginning of the film, as a French teacher and poet, who has a long-term girlfriend named Fred (short for Frédérique, played by Suzanne Clément), and who is still dressing as a man. Immediately after Laurence’s 35^th birthday, s/he decides to come out as someone who identifies female, which includes beginning to dress as a woman in public. Laurence also has to tackle telling his somewhat distant and icy mother Julienne (Nathalie Baye), but the real hurdle is Fred, who is unaware of Laurence’s need to identify as female, and with whom Laurence wants more than anything to accept him/her as s/he is and to continue their loving and fruitful companionship. The film traces 10 years in Laurence and Fred’s relationship; the film’s story begins in 1989, but we eventually learn that they first got together in 1987, and the film ends in 1999.

I’m presenting dry facts here hoping that you do the math for yourself. Wait, a 24 year old has made four feature films? Of which all four premiered at the world’s best and most important festivals? And a bare minimum of two of these films are very good? And he’s not afraid to set them in a time period that came before he was born or was too young to remember? Etc. etc. It is mind boggling, really. And the best thing is that I’m not trumpeting these films because they’re good for a 24-year old; they’re good for someone of any age. Dolan’s age is a curiosity, a piece of trivia; it’s not at all the most important or interesting thing about his work.

To be specific about Laurence Anyways, the first time I watched it, it was one of those films that was neither boring nor terribly enthralling, but the ending is surprisingly affecting, and it played well in my memory long after having seen it. Laurence is just a regular person; flawed maybe, but kind and loving and not large and dramatic like how most other filmmakers would have painted the character. Really, the more memorable character is Fred, with whom Clément really works wonders; she’s the least actressy actress I’ve encountered in quite some time, and Fred feels both very real and very lived in. She has a number of scenes where she basically chews the scenery, but she doesn’t let the seams show when she’s doing it; it’s a remarkable feat.

On the whole, the film plays like a long episode of thirtysomething that was directed by Gregg Araki. Given the life experience on display in the film, it’s natural to come out of it wanting to know more about how Dolan came to make it, and at that point you have about 140 total minutes of special features to dive into. Nearly an hour of that is deleted scenes which are introduced by Dolan (who for the most part takes a backseat in this package as a personality; he doesn’t act in Laurence Anyways as he did in his first two films, nor does he provide a commentary track), who comes off at once as being assured and childish; this seems apt, given that he’s a remarkably assured filmmaker but is also basically a child. Elsewhere we have an 80-minute interview with him that was conducted at the Museum of Modern Art earlier this year (this feature is only included on the Blu-ray release), which was part of a retrospective of his films. (Yes, there goes that alarm again: MoMA had a retrospective of a then-23-year old filmmaker’s work.) While this interview contains some interesting biographical facts about Dolan that help to explain how he even managed to secure funding to make these films, Dolan doesn’t come off quite as well here as he does in the deleted scene intros; in the MoMA interview he seems more inarticulate and full of himself.

I’m willing to give him a pass, though, so long as he keeps making movies like this. You have to hand it to him for making a nearly three-hour picture that is more intimate than epic, that is never boring, and that builds some very memorable characters. He’s also among the best right now in constructing memorable visuals, and he uses music incredibly well. As much as I like his first three films, I feel like his best film is still ahead of him. And that gives him, what, approximately 50 years to prove me right? | Pete Timmermann