Heartbeats
“Heartbeats (2010)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: July 24th, 2014
This is the first in what I hope will be a long-running series of content I post to this website. When I first conceived of this Writings Section to accompany our blog I anticipated writing a lengthy, well-researched post every week. What’s a few hours work to hone my critical/historical/analytical skills? Instead I wrote one personal essay about my habit of judging films quickly and how it manifested during Under the Skin, and then spent the last three months starting various essays without coming close to finishing any of them. Now I will taper down my ambitions ever so slightly. I will focus on films I see in the theatre, and attempt to write short, perhaps more casual, essays about each of them. My hope is that I build up a big enough head of momentum to begin churning out those other essays I’ve been planning. But if not, at least this section of the website won’t be such a wasteland.
Heartbeats feels like a movie about sex made by someone who may not have ever had any unmediated sexual experiences. Or any unmediated life experiences. This is far too snarky a way to begin, but I’m at a loss for any other way to start. Heartbeats feels like the pastiche of a film lover who has little conception of the real world. I spent the film hoping for a moment that felt real, lived-in, unexpected, lifelike, and instead I received a conveyor belt of familiar media references in an overlong sitcom. Many of the film’s reviews acknowledge its retread of a familiar formula, but the positive ones are quick to highlight the film’s stylishness as an attribute that helps overcome its sophomoric premise. I disagreed with this assertion from both possible angles: firstly, that the style made up for the lack of substance, but secondly, that the film was even that stylish to begin with.
Shots in the film are, I will admit, heavily stylized. There’s a self-consciousness to them. But this self-consciousness calls attention to itself in ways that are unhelpful. More standard framing choices, such as a standard shot-reverse shot pattern, would likely be more boring to look at, but their conventionality would likely render them largely unnoticeable. Instead Dolan makes choices that call acute attention to themselves, but the internal motivation seems to be “why not do it this way?” Or, “this might look good.” The idea of an underlying psychology, or thematically motivated connective tissue between style and content is nowhere to be seen. For example, in an early scene Francis (played by Dolan) and Marie (played by Monia Chokri) stand in front of a cutting board loudly chopping vegetables (the sound design of this moment elicited one of the film’s few laughs) after having spotted Nicholas (Niels Schneider), the film’s love interest. They are framed from behind, each of their heads occupying a specific portion of the frame that gives it an odd symmetry. A scene or two later the shot repeats (though the characters have switched places, perhaps to highlight their emotional interchangeability), this time in front of a clothing rack at a boutique. Having established this pattern, one might think that Dolan intended to create a visual rhyming scheme for the movie, interjecting this shot throughout in increasingly ridiculous scenarios, perhaps to call attention to the characters’ increasingly ridiculous behavior. Instead the shot disappears for the remainder of the film and the audience receives no satisfying resolution to its inclusion.
Another motif of heavy stylization occurs in the film’s depiction of sexual activity. Intermittently throughout the narrative Francis and Marie engage in one-off sexual encounters. These scenes are filmed with a certain detached erotica, often using extreme close-ups to splice bodies into abstract segments. In conjunction with this technique Dolan films each of these scenes with a harsh, monocolor lighting scheme that changes with each scene (if I recall correctly there are four scenes, one red, one green, one blue, and one yellow). This combination of alienating techniques saps the films of their sensuality, highlighting the meaninglessness of these encounters compared to their unrequited love for Nicholas. These characters aren’t people to Francis and Marie, just stand-ins to momentarily satiate biological carnality. But even if these scenes contain a sense of artistic intentionality, their execution remains formulaic. None of these stylistic flourishes, even conjoined with one another, are fresh in 2011.
The use of slow motion is similarly unsatisfying. The way that music suddenly pounds through the stereo as characters inch across the screen in blatant homage to Wes Anderson’s least interesting signature flourish. Anderson’s use of slow motion, much as I often find it cumbersome and unnecessary, is at least always psychologically motivated, calling attention to the cinema’s fantastical ability to stop time and linger in a moment. An example I enjoy comes when Max Fischer pulls off the bee prank in Rushmore and walks away in self-congratulatory bliss. That moment highlights Max’s smugness, and the way he imagines himself to be the hero in a kind of spy film. Heartbeats sometimes uses slow motion to psychological effect, as when it soaks in Francis and Marie staring at Nicholas’ body in the film’s first scene, enthralled by his presence. But other times the slow motion simply exists, as it shows either Francis or Marie strutting through Montreal like an advertisement for expensive shoes. But even the advertising world, let alone cinema, has already beaten Dolan at this game. Pick any contemporary commercial featuring slow motion and its sexualized abstraction of fashion and style stands head and shoulders above what Dolan achieves here.
“But that is the point!” one might argue. Dolan isn’t trying to use slow motion to glamorize these people’s lives, to fetishize their existence the way that advertising does. The slow motion, you could say, highlights their stasis, their lack of emotional development. That interpretation certainly exists, but I don’t buy it. Every non-slow motion scene shoots for the stars in terms of emotional turmoil, loading itself up in catty banter, seething resentment, and unfulfilled desire. If turgid ennui is what Dolan intends with these slow motion moments, why does the rest of the film feel so endlessly dramatic? Where are the moments of quiet boredom? Where is the mundanity? Everything in this film is pumped up to 11, but none of it is fun, and it’s far too self-consciously hip to risk plunging into its own ridiculousness, amping itself on melodrama and going for a darkly overblown satire of youthful romanticism. Dolan likes these characters too much to fully cut their knees out, but he never gives a compelling reason why the audience should like them too. In nearly every scene Francis and Marie, supposedly best friends, are awful to one another, and they have no actual personalities save the combination of cruelty and lovesickness. Nicholas fares even worse, showcasing zero attributes to explain their continued interest in him. He is good looking, of course, but many people are good looking. And he is not very charming. Dolan paints him as something of a simpleton, but not an especially charismatic simpleton. This leads to an unhelpful middle ground, where we are detached from the emotional intensity of Francis and Marie’s romantic enthrallment, but not far enough removed for the film to make any useful new commentary.
Dolan was only 21 when he made this film, and it is certainly far better than the film I could have made at 21. Unfortunately, it still reeks of a child filmmaker struggling to find a useful point of view. He has been heralded for the brave decision to skip film school, to self-fund his own first feature at the age of 19, to buck a meaningless system of pseudo-apprenticeship. I support finding other avenues for self-expression, especially avoiding the method that tends to rack up enormous amounts of debt and offer relatively little useful experience. If he had gone that route, and Heartbeats was a student film made in his junior year of college, this would a masterwork. But Heartbeats played at Cannes. It intends to be considered alongside actual films. And as an actual film, it remains quite a bit below average.
-Basil Swartzfager, 2014
