Anyways?

The French Canadian gay wunderkind director Xavier Dolan's third movie, Laurence Anyways, about a romance disrupted by one partner's desire for a sex change, is far too long and self-indulgent. Dolan, still only in his mid-twenties, seems to confuse violent gesture and mugging with event, blaringly loud music and sound effects with revelation, and the combination of the two with coherent structure. It's a dubious choice to use the bland and neutral French actor Melvil Poupaud as the sex-changing protagonist, Laurence Alia. Poupaud's sex change is neither troubling nor convincing. One good thing: Nathalie Baye is great as Laurence's acerbic mother, Julienne. It's fun to watch her brief scenes. She always nails them. But Dolan is only barely adequate as a storyteller. He is weak at conveying character or relationships, which is fatal in Laurence Anyways, which focuses on a turbulent ten-year affair. So what happens with this movie is as Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian says: "It goes on for ever without getting properly started: an epic of depthless self-indulgence."

This is not to say Laurence Anyways's isn't rich in remarkable characters, amazing costumes, and visually striking scenes. But Bradshaw still describes the film's overall effect. It's so full of its own importance, so blind to the inadequacy of its efforts at exposition, that it completely fails to notice that the "epic" romance of Laurence and his publicity filmmaker girlfriend Fred (Suzanne Clément) never makes sense. It's celebrated, glamorized, and made into a schtick, but what they do together as a couple is a blank. At least Julienne is hostile and negative. That we get.

So Laurence and Fred are buddies, pals, lovers, whatever, and then Laurence announces he has always wanted to be a woman, and now he's going to cross over. Again, instead of revelation or exposition we get a violent scene of incomprehension. So Fred has had no hint of this? Laurence's first steps are limited and odd. He, now tentatively she, turns up in the middle school class he(she) teaches in smart high heels, with a feminine top, eye liner and lipstick, and one long earring, with crewcut hair (the way Poupaud has been wearing his once-curly locks for years). And the kids say nothing; they don't react. It may simply be that Dolan does not "do" children. The faculty members get together and, presenting an article from a "suburban" newspaper about Laurence's makeover at school that they've shown to the school board, request that Laurence clear his desk. When this kind of trouble comes, and Laurence without a job isn't as agreeable as formerly, Fred and Laurence aren't such a happy couple any more. Truth to tell though Fred puts a happy face on it, she would really rather not have a cross-dresser for a boyfriend.

Laurence has insisted he is not gay. But the question is, if he wants to be a woman so badly, how can he be Fred's man (the complication of the masculine-sounding nickname "Fred" seems irrelevant)? Amidst all the bright colors and oddball characters -- some of whom become a kind of support group for Laurence now -- there is no time for mundane details like the mechanics of sex. But in a film about sex -- surely sex change is a form of sex -- such blind spots are troubling.

Always remembering that this is "an epic of depthless self-indulgence," Laurence Anyways is, nonetheless, pretty watchable. That's because Dolan is such a natural talent as a filmmaker: the sequences are eye candy, and the drama, however disconnected or lifeless, never stops unfolding (without revealing or developing). But watchable doesn't always mean good, and after Dolan's repetitious and strident autobiographical debut about his Mommie issues, I Killed My Mother and the pretty, lightweight, and repetitious New Wave-y sophomore film about a gay crush, Heartbeats, the wunderkind is beginning to seem not so wunderbar anymore. To me, anyways.

Laurence Anyways, 168 mins., debuted at Cannes in 2012, and many other festivals followed. Released in France July 18, 2012, where it did pretty well critically (Allociné press: 3.5), notably with those bellwethers of Parisian cinematic hipness, Cahiers du Cinéma and Les Inrockuptibles. US release June 28, 2013.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.