In a world where films that clock in at or around three hours tend to take straight, white men as their subjects (last year alone gave us “Boyhood” and “Mr. Turner,” to name two), it takes a certain chutzpah to make an epic-length movie about 15 years in the life of a transgender woman. When the filmmaker in question is only 23, and when the film is directed with the confidence and total stylistic control of a seasoned veteran, then you know you’re in the presence of someone worth keeping an eye on. Enter Xavier Dolan and “Laurence Anyways.”
To compare: Orson Welles directed “Citizen Kane” when he was 26. Xavier Dolan, who has been called — among other, less favorable epithets — the French-Canadian Orson Welles, turns 26 today. (That leaves most of you reading this with a good four to eight years left to make your mark on the film world.) It’s beyond debate that Welles’ debut film is more polished than anything Dolan has made up until this point in his career, though to be entirely fair Dolan couldn’t seem to care less about “polish.”
Before arriving on the international film scene as the pre-eminent young writer-director-actor of queer cinema, Xavier Dolan came from humble beginnings. Just kidding: a child star by the age of four, he went on to voice Ron Weasley in the French-Canadian dub of the “Harry Potter” films. In 2009, at the age of 19, his autobiographical first film “I Killed My Mother” — about the tensions that arise between mother and son over the son’s sexuality, not about matricide — debuted out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival to an eight-minute standing ovation. Dolan followed this auspicious premiere with four more films over the next five years; his latest, “Mommy,” brought him his widest audience yet and earned him the Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, an award the jury bestowed upon him ex-aequo with French New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.
“Mommy” may be the most talked-about film of Dolan’s career, but in my opinion it’s “Laurence Anyways” that best showcases his talents as a director and storyteller and hints at great things in store for his future. “Laurence” stars Melvil Poupaud as the title character, a teacher who, on her 30th birthday, reveals her transgender identity to longtime girlfriend Fred (short for Frederique, and played by Suzanne Clement, Quebec’s best-kept secret). Dolan tracks the ups and downs in Laurence and Fred’s relationship across 15 years, dedicating equal attention both to Laurence, as she navigates the tricky process of transitioning at work and home, and to Fred, who finds herself torn as she tries to reconcile her love for Laurence with her own hopelessly heterosexual needs.
This premise in the hands of a then-23 year old director could have been a disaster; if you have a particular distaste for Celine Dion, outrageously melodramatic acting and clothes that cascade from the sky for no apparent reason, a disaster it very well may be. Yet Dolan clearly knows what he’s doing as a director: his framing effortlessly captures the alternating claustrophobia and freedom Laurence feels through various stages in her journey and his pacing of the story makes the film’s three-hour runtime fly by. And whether or not Dolan’s unapologetic exuberance tickles your fancy, “Laurence Anyways” ultimately stays afloat on the power of the empathy Dolan expresses for everyone in his willfully outlandish cinematic universe.
Critics seem too intent on coming up with witty labels for Dolan (most recently he’s been likened to a millennial Woody Allen) and calling him out on his narcissistic public persona to acknowledge his preternatural knack for getting inside the heads of people quite unlike himself. It’s impressive enough that the film paints such a well-rounded portrait of a transgender woman (Laurence is much more realistically nuanced than, say, Jared Leto’s character in “Dallas Buyers Club”), so it’s a pleasant surprise when the film commits to delving just as deeply into Fred’s tortured psyche.
Dolan can claim credit for writing a character with such agonizingly credible internal struggles, but Suzanne Clément deserves accolades in spades for realizing Fred with equal parts tenderness and ferocity. She rightly took home an acting prize when “Laurence Anyways” premiered at Cannes in 2012, and if there’s any justice in the film industry she’ll become a regular at awards podiums the world over.
When I initially saw “Laurence Anyways,” I quickly declared it a mini-masterpiece — which is not to say that the film is flawless. Rather, it’s the perfect cinematic expression of Xavier Dolan’s artistic and interpersonal sensibilities; it’s the kind of movie any young director wants to be able to make, one undefiled by the expectations of producers or studios with wildly different visions than their own.
Some critics have been turned off by Dolan’s messy excesses, and while I can sympathize with the school of thought that finds the spontaneous second-act living room waterfall to be an overindulgent touch, I can’t picture “Laurence” being any better without it or any of its other extravagancies. Dolan reiterates in interview after interview that his intention as a filmmaker is to create based on that which he cares about and relates to. Love him or hate him, few other filmmakers working today — of any age and in any country — seem as intent on telling the stories of people at the margins of society with such empathy, nuance and enthusiasm as Dolan does.
Tim Markatos is a senior in the College. The Cinema Files appears every other Friday.
