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In the new film, Heartbeats (Les Amours Imaginaires), auteur Xavier Dolan succeeds in creating a stylish and moody story centering on a three-way love triangle. A love shared by two friends Marie (Mona Chokri) and Francis (director Xavier Dolan himself) towards a sumptuous blond-ego tripped wonder, Adonis Nicolas (Niels Schneider). Set to some ear-tasty music fronted by a french Dalida sung version of “Bang Bang” we receive a story about the tensions, exasperation and unfulfilled promise of expectations, intermingled occasionally by quasi-documentary tidbit lessons of love from random people.  The film is a meditation on the senselessness of love and why its own madness is what makes it so appealing. The director’s own vanity fits in perfectly with his fetishist approach, the Wong Kar Wai-like sensual slow-motion to heighten gesture and make us take a long hard look at the high-strung game players of love.

The performances of the three leads are pitch-perfect, and both Monia Chokri and Xavier Dolan have the eyebrow-raise and disgruntled side-smile down to a fine art. As the tumultuousness of love for Nicolas deepens for the two of them their close friendship begins to suffer. The two friends become embroiled in a struggle to please Nicolas who appears to represent Dolan’s own ideal. The theme of idealization is explored notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.

The rising tensions between the two best friends are anxiously palpable. A wicked web of envy, oneupmanship and unrequited yearning, they elegantly elbow their way into Nico’s affections, constantly battling for his attentions. Romantic obsession begins to take hold of the two friends as they vie for the affection of someone who will never return their love. Their clever machinations are delicious and piqued jealousy heartbreaking. Francis is sulky, at times horrendous, while Marie’s sarcastic smiles are no more than an animalistic defence hiding her delicate vulnerability.

Love here is all about style, our “heroes” turn up to only the most fabulous parties, where only exactly the right music plays, Moet flows generously and where only the beautiful people lounge. Have you money, looks, wit, are you fun, are you educated, these are the criteria for these young folk in their quest to get together. Although the alternate title to the film “Love, Imagined” is accurate in many respects, I think it underestimates the headiness and the glory of these admittedly judgemental and narcissistic love throes.

My initial reaction was to scoff at Heartbeats for its deeply self-conscious gimmicks and its glaring hipness, but I was pulled under its spell rather quickly, sympathetic to its experiential approach to the rhythms of unrequited love. I found commonality with the characters, to which I followed ever so clearly in each of their emotional turfs. It was refreshing to watch a romance film where the subjects are portrayed so consciously. The film makes you realize all the properties of love, not just of young love, but of the love game, and all its stages of pain, rejection, frustration, and hurt. Watching the characters, I went through the gamut of my own memories of attraction and rejection, bouncing around like the ping-pong balls that the expressive actors represent in their own attraction/flirtation/appeasement fluctuations. In fact, the more the film is watched with introspection, the more relevant it becomes. You realize that love knows no boundaries, and its a type of emotion better felt than never having to feel it at all.