It helps, no doubt, that they’re easy on the eyes. Monia Chokri, Niels Schneider, metteur en scène (-en costumes, etc) Xavier Dolan—all beauties, and specific enough that the anxieties of influence hardly matter. Is confidence (in look, in ability) all you need? Case by case. Here, as in I Killed My Mother, Dolan has the filmmaking chops and emotional insight to homage whomever he pleases. Why repeat the names of those who came before; Dolan’s love is his own, and very present tense despite all the “vintage” (the word itself is dissected and left for dead in the banter between Chokri’s Marie and Dolan’s Francis—frenemies to the end, both obsessed with Schneider’s Nicolas, he of the multiple beauty marks). Perhaps too schematic in its rhyming-couplet, monochrome sex scenes, as well as in the faux-confessionals with Marie and Francis’ circle of friends, talking about relationship woes past (incredible array of faces, though, especially the Ray Ban-bespectacled Jewish girl). The grace notes come moment-to-moment (no profound harmonies overall), though the party sequence midway through, segueing from Dalida’s cover of “Bang Bang” to House of Pain (and including some De Palma-circa-Femme Fatale shoe adoration), is brilliantly sustained. Schneider is the perfect impossible object, statuesque (visually linked to Michelangelo’s David, of course) and cruelly self-aware of his golden-locked gorgeousness. Francis has the right idea: such perfection must be retched out of the system like a hairball. But, wink-wink (at who?), Louis Garrel is always waiting in the wings…
Immediate Impressions 