It actually started on Thursday with a screening of Gregg Araki's delirious Kaboom, about which I have reported before.
But surely it does no harm to provide you with one or two visual, er, highlights from that film, just to refresh your memories...
This, of course, is Chris Zylka, playing a "straight" surfer boy who is apparently dumb as a box of rocks and is seen here having been caught trying to learn how to auto-fellate.
Yes...
Anyway, last night's film was the altogether less jolly but, perhaps, "better" film Les Amours Imaginaires (ludicrously translated as Heartbeats).
By French-Canadian genius film-maker Xavier Dolan (whose I Killed my Mother was one of the best LLGFF films last year), Heartbeats is as emotionally raw a film as I have seen in a long time.
It's all about yearning and overwhelming lust and love and jealousy and friendship.
Dolan himself also stars (why does one person get so much talent and all the beauty, damnit?), and gives us another selfless, awe-inspiring display.
Monia Chokri, as his uber-stylish best friend (she has some sort of Audrey Hepburn fixation), is equally good.
And Niels Schneider figures large as the totty lust object. He is very, very convincing in this role. He is by no means a gym-pumped steroid-stud, and is all the more naturally lustable for it.
The film features "inter-titles" in the form of talking heads telling us of their apparently real-life experiences in breaking-up or being stalker or stalkee. These don't seem to me to add much to the film and, instead, tend to get in the way of our identification with the characters.
But that's a minor quibble about a film which has so much to offer -- the nervous and inappropriate giggles of the audience showed just how often this movie touched the raw emotional nerves buried not so deep in all of us. Grisly but gripping. The new small-but-beautifully-formed LLGFF is off to a corkingly good start.
Cock count: I should add that there is, disappointingly, no cock whatsoever in Heartbeats, while Kaboom (unusually for Araki) does have some: an extraordinarily brief blink-and-you'll-miss-it flash of Chris Zylka's modest winkie, and a very distant full-frontal shot (which seemed shorter than when I last saw this film) of star Thomas Dekker in a dream sequence. This is a disappointingly low cock count, if I may say so.
2 comments:
I agree with you about 'Heartbeats' in everything you say. (Why 'Heartbeats'? A more direct translation of the French title wouldn't have been misleading.) Like you, I found the talking heads at best a distraction, at worst confusing. My friend tried to explain them as being the reality and the main film a sort of dream sequence of their experiences: that seems a little far-fetched.
I thought the camera work was stylish and often startling, always excellent.
Completely agree with you about the camera-work, and I was particularly pleased to find that still of Monia Chokri -- one of the most daring shots in the film, I thought.
Cinematographers, like editors, rarely get the credit they deserve.
Post a Comment