Laurence Anyways

Synopsis: It's1989 andLaurence (Melvil Poupaud), a school-teacher madly in love with his girlfriend Frédérique (Suzanne Clément). When Laurence announces that he wants to change sex their already volatile relationship is put under further pressure. The film charts the 10-year history of their relationship.

Québécois director Dolan made a head-turning auteurial debut in 2009, aged 20, as writer-director-star of I Killed My Mother and followed it up with the 2010 offbeat rom-com, Heartbeats. Both films with their visual flair and lively approach to story-telling had hipster style written all over them. Dolan's new offering has these elements once again in evidence but it’s also freighted with the ill-effect that success so often brings – self-indulgence. Although the version that we are seeing is cut down from the original 168 minutes the film is still far too long, with the second hour in particular unnecessarily drawn out.

It is somewhat puzzling given Dolan’s Almodóvaresque interest in non-conventional gender roles, evidenced in both this and his earlier films, that his depiction of Laurence is so unsteady. Firstly, much of the film is concerned with the character as a transsexual and there are various references to him having changed sex, but for most of the running time he is not only decidedly pre-op but there is no insight into what such a literally life-changing transformation means to him. Secondly, and this perhaps reflects the extent of Dolan's auteurial delusions as he gives himself a credit as a costume designer, Poupaud, who is a very attractive-looking young man (he played the lead to good effect in Ozon's 2005 film Time To Leave), looks ridiculous in drag, his clothes, hair and make-up seeming to have come from the deceased estate of a 50 year old matron. We know that the 90s were awful fashion-wise but there was no need to make the protagonist a walking illustration of just how awful. The effect is only to further undermine the credibility of Laurence's transformation.  And making the character a prize-winning novelist/poet is all a bit too pretentious. I assume we are meant to sympathise with Laurence but Dolan and/or Poupaud really give us no reason to. The crimson-tressed Clément on the other had, always looks fabulous and is far more effective in eliciting our sympathies.

The final 30 minutes or so of the film redeems some of the lost ground and in the final analysis, as a portrait of how relationships change and love tears us apart, Laurence Anyways is quite effective. It just needed to be an hour shorter.

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