Critics reviews

It's hard to overstate just how much Laurence Anyways is Poupaud's film as much as it is Dolan's. It's all the more remarkable since the actor was a last-minute replacement, cast shortly before shooting began after Louis Garrel (for whom Dolan had written the role) bailed out. Garrel's loss, our win; it's unimaginable to think of anyone else inhabiting the role of Laurence.

The film is marked by moments of stunningly expressive stylization that put it in another league beyond the normal prestige picture "issues" biopic.

No amount of inside jokes or soft-focus backgrounds can shield the lovers from what's coming, and Dolan simultaneously girds us and disarms us with the film's epic-worthy aesthetics, the slowly approaching camera (reminiscent most recently of compatriot Denis Villeneuve's Incendies) and long distance "tunnel" shots, down wood-paneled hallways, across the manicured street, or from the far end of a blue-hued bar, everyone waiting for someone to appear from offscreen with a solution.

I think I know what Dolan intended, I think I understand the [Laurence] character as he exists on the page, but Poupaud, a fine actor, wanders a bit. I put the blame for this squarely on Dolan, who loses control of the material at key moments... All of which makes Clément's accomplishment even more impressive. Fred is also an underwritten character with by-the-book motivations, and yet Clément's performance is so charged, she throws the entire film out of balance.

On the morning Laurence comes out to her class, there's a long pause while the students stare; then the first to raise a hand asks a totally mundane question. The scene is followed by the prof's parade down a crowded school hallway. Laurence may not have been born to wear a pencil skirt, but she's a quick study. It's a disarming, funny sequence, and introduces the recurring motif that for Laurence the construction of identity is a kind of performance art.

For Dolan, the plot is, in effect, an opera libretto for which his splashily colorful, impressionistic images are the music; joined to the elbows-out, full-throttle histrionics, they evoke an intensity and a sympathy that override the director's vague insights and skittery ideas.

As he's exhibited in previous work, Dolan is a highly instinctual filmmaker. Fluctuating tones, temperatures, and rhythms form a wondrously paradoxical tapestry. The film feels simultaneously loose and deliberate, jokey and serious, a stylistic mishmash that probably shouldn't work but somehow does.

Laurence Anyways practically hums with the exhilaration of a director digging in his heels and pushing his boundaries, from its near-three-hour running time to its more explicit engagement with the cultural politics of queer existence. If the film ultimately reveals some of his artistic and ideological limits, it also offers a thrilling new variation of Dolan's still-forming worldview, mapping his emotional intimacy and expressivity onto a large-scale canvas.

The recklessness of youth may be the movie's salvation: where an older director might have muted some of the more operatic scenes, fearing accusations of affectation, Mr. Dolan fearlessly lets fly. The result is a big, beautiful, rambling immersion in a passion whose heat is fueled primarily by its impossibility.

What [Laurence Anyways] represents is crucially specific, but the pain it articulates is universal: The film expresses, with much style and sophistication (if, at nearly three hours, perhaps an overabundance of both), the personal tragedy of love torn apart, of watching helplessly as your life crashes hard into another's but fails to stick.

One scene at a crowded Saturday brunch, when Fred unleashes a torrent of stunningly inventive profanity at a condescending waitress, is as memorable as any this year. But at nearly three hours, it's entirely too long, needlessly padded out with an intrusive interview-framing device. After two hours go by, certain choices — like Dolan's coy avoidance of Laurence's changing face during key moments — seem affected, rather than intriguing.

[...Dolan] is clearly in the middle of a burning creative streak. Evidently, he wants to go big—to make the movies that stay with you. But he has never mounted something as ambitious as his latest, a riot of ruffled clothes, strutting defiance and bruised endurance. (A mini-Kubrick, Dolan writes, directs, designs costumes, edits and sometimes acts, but not this time.) Separation and reconnection are destinations the film gestures to, along with a final flourish that can't last.