Join WhatsApp Channel
Join Telegram Channel“…an epic adventure, almost a transgender Titanic”
Released in 2012 in cinemas, Laurence Anyways of Xavier Dolanwill return to France 4 this Saturday evening, as well as in replay on the France.TV channels website. The editorial team recommends it to you, while waiting for news of his next film, between comedy and horror.
“Laurence and Fred love each other with a passionate love. But on his thirtieth birthday, Laurence announces to Fred that he wants to become a woman and asks him to accompany him in his transformation. For Fred, it is a thunderclap, but she still decides to give their relationship a chance. Faced with judgments and incomprehension, Laurence and Fred will do everything to preserve their extraordinary love.
After two clumsy attempts (I killed my mother And Imaginary Loves) who established him as the new darling of world cinema, Xavier Dolan23 years old, a little pop Fassbinder from Montreal, openly conceived his third film as a heralded masterpiece, a very early magnum opus which would synthesize his obsessions as a modern young man passionate about mad love and romanticism. teenage and baroque excesses. The length of the film is extraordinary (2 hours 39 minutes!) and the subject is frankly jaw-dropping (ten years in the life of a man who wishes to become a woman). Sin of pride? No doubt, but it is precisely this arrogance, its messy and deliberately too much appearance that Laurence Anyways draws its strength.
The film is a delirious hypothesis of total cinema, in which Dolan throws on the screen everything he loves, absolutely everything (his new wave hits favorites, a ton of literary and movie quotes, the best and worst of 90's fashion…), throughout a story with astonishing speed of execution. The very good idea, above all, is not to be so much interested in the expected (and feared) dissertation on the norm and the margin as in the impossible love story between this transsexual hero (Poupaud, brilliant) and the girl who can't help but love him. Dolan films this love story like an odyssey, an epic adventure, almost a Titanic transgender. So, of course, the dross abounds (teenage naivety, authorial pretensions, sitcomesque dialogues), but the astounding energy sweeps away everything in its path. Film at full speed, at the risk of crashing… Frankly, we prefer that to any “great coming of age film” self-proclaimed.
From I Killed My Mother to Mommy: How Xavier Dolan Got Big