Laurence Anyways

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167 min.

Directed by: 

Xavier Dolan

Starring: 

Melvil Poupaud

Suzanne Clément

Nathalie Baye

Monia Chokri

Screenplay by: 

Xavier Dolan

Rated 14A; Sexual Content, Tobacco Use.

En français avec sous-titres en anglais. In French with English subtitles.

For Xavier Dolan, the ambitious boy wonder of Quebecois cinema, life is a series of great hair days. Set in 1990s Montreal, the 23-year-old auteur’s third feature is a sumptuously orchestrated love story about a transsexual woman’s decade-long struggle to maintain a passionate romance with her female soulmate in the face of creeping hostility from friends, family and society. Laurence Anyways is Dolan’s strongest pitch yet to have himself crowned Canada’s answer to Pedro Almodóvar.

Starring the French cinema icon Melvil Poupard as Laurence and Suzanne Clément as her lover Frédérique, Laurence Anyways is the first of Dolan’s films not to feature the director himself. Remaining oddly vague about Laurence’s surgical transformation and subsequent sex life, Dolan instead creates a more familiar story about two volatile people who can never quite live either together or apart.

Dolan surrounds his leads with excellent supporting characters, including French screen veteran Nathalie Baye as Laurence’s glacially aloof mother and Monia Chokri as Frédérique’s remorselessly sarcastic sister. But there are jarring caricatures too, notably Laurence’s implausible alternative family of ageing drag queens and burlesque singers, who appear to have stumbled in from a Fellini movie.

But however undercooked and overstuffed his story may be, Dolan excels as a visual stylist, framing almost every shot like a classic modern art canvas. Rain-slicked streets pulse with hot-pink nightclub neon. Clothes rain from the sky in slow-motion Pop Art blizzards. Every lavish costume and opulent interior appears art-directed to painstaking perfection.

– Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter

Montréal, 1988. Prof de lettres, Laurence (Melvil Poupaud, tout en délicatesse) file le parfait amour avec Frédérique (Suzanne Clément, époustouflante) quand, incapable de se mentir plus longtemps, il décide de devenir ce qu’il a toujours voulu être : une femme. Son couple y survivra-t-il ?

Fresque sentimentale de 2h40 sur douze ans de la vie d’un homme déterminé à changer de sexe sans changer de vie, Laurence Anyways fait mieux que confirmer les promesses des Amours imaginaires, le précédent film de Xavier Dolan; il les réinvente. L’écriture du cinéaste – son romantisme éperdu mâtiné d’humour sarcastique, son lyrisme pop qui remixe Musset et Duran Duran, les Beaux-Arts et l’esthétique clippée de la fin des années 1980 – y révèle une densité, une ampleur romanesque insoupçonnées. Au fond, la transsexualité n’est ici qu’un prétexte à raconter la marginalité de la passion amoureuse. C’est brillant, moderne, bouleversant. D’une insolente beauté.

– Nicolas Schaller, Le Nouvel Observateur