Event

Heartbeats

Seattle Premiere!

Heartbeats

(Xavier Dolan, Canada, 2010, 35mm, 95 min) Xavier Dolan, at 22 years old one of the youngest filmmakers in North America, continues to impress with this sophomore effort. The film follows good friends Francis and Mary. One night they meet Nick, a young man from the country who has just settled in Montreal. After multiple encounters, troubled by signs and omens (some real, some imagined), Francis and Mary fall deeper and deeper into a fantastical obsession. Soon they find themselves on the precipice of a love duel that threatens the friendship they once thought indestructible. Wrapped in a hyper-stylized pop cultural patchwork, Heartbeats samples unabashedly from Bach to House of Pain to The Knife, in the light of colorful Audrey Hepburn-vintage stroboscope, back silhouettes in slow-motion and edgy editing. Dolan's film universe stretches from the French New Wave via Woody Allen to Wong Kar-wai and Wes Anderson, never compromising the originality of the present work.