Laurence Anyways
2012 · Xavier Dolan
The story of an impossible love between a woman named Fred and a transgender woman named Laurence who reveals her inner desire to become her true self.
dir. Xavier Dolan · 2012
Montreal, 1989: a literature teacher tells the woman she loves that she has always been a woman, and the two spend the following decade trying to invent a form for a love that fits no available category. Xavier Dolan was twenty-three when he made this, his third feature, and it announced the full Dolan arsenal: slow-motion reveries, wall-to-wall needle drops from Visage to Duran Duran, costume and wallpaper as emotional weather, and sudden surrealist eruptions — clothes raining from the sky, a waterfall indoors. Shot in boxy 1.33:1, the frame keeps cropping the world down to two faces. Suzanne Clément, whose ferocious Fred won the Un Certain Regard acting prize at Cannes, is the film's live wire; Melvil Poupaud plays Laurence with a watchful, wounded dignity. A cornerstone of Quebec's twenty-first-century cinema and of the new queer canon — though later viewers have rightly debated the casting of a cis actor — it remains Dolan's most expansive work: nearly three hours, ten years, and a romance conducted at the pitch of opera.
Lines of influence
- In the Mood for Love (2000) — The ritualized slow-motion glide set to a recurring musical cue — bodies drifting through corridors as a song swells — is the exact template Dolan uses for his slow-mo/needle-drop emotional suspensions.
- Happy Together (1997) — Charts a queer relationship's decay through abrupt saturated-color shifts and pop needle-drops rather than plot, the structuring device Dolan inherits for his decade-spanning love story.
- All About My Mother (1999) — Places a transgender character inside a maternal melodrama and lets theatrical costume and color excess carry the emotion — Dolan's costume-as-emotion and melodramatic register descend directly from this Almodóvarian mode.
- All That Heaven Allows (1955) — Externalizes forbidden love through Technicolor mise-en-scène and pointed color coding, the founding grammar of Dolan's idea that clothing and hue can speak the feeling the characters cannot.
- The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) — Reworks Sirkian melodrama into queer chamber drama where successive costume changes mark the shifting emotional temperature — a device Dolan literalizes in Laurence's evolving wardrobe.
- Far From Heaven (2002) — A studied Sirk revival that resurrects period-precise production design and pushes gay subtext into text, modeling how a contemporary director can inhabit vintage melodrama sincerely rather than ironically.
- 8½ (1963) — Punctures its realist surface with surrealist eruptions and fantasy set-pieces, the license Dolan draws on for his indoor rainfall and cascading-clothing interruptions.
- Magnolia (1999) — Stages a literal surreal downpour of falling objects as an emotional climax across an ensemble, a precedent for Dolan's staging of surrealist eruptions as feeling made physical.
- My Own Private Idaho (1991) — A cornerstone of New Queer Cinema that folds lyrical slow-motion and dreamlike interludes into a queer narrative, the arthouse lineage Dolan explicitly extends.
- Nowhere (1997) — New Queer Cinema built on saturated stylization and a curated shoegaze/pop needle-drop soundtrack, an antecedent for Dolan's use of music cues as the emotional engine.
- Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires) (2010) — Dolan's own prior film establishes the signature fusion of fetishistic slow-motion and needle-drop (its recurring Dalida cue) that Laurence Anyways expands to feature-length ambition.
- Mommy (2014) — Extends Dolan's aspect-ratio expressiveness from Laurence's boxy Academy framing to a locked 1:1 square that physically opens up during a euphoric needle-drop, pushing the same formal device further.
- A Single Man (2009) — Uses couture-precise costume and desaturation-to-saturation color surges to externalize a gay man's grief, the same 'design-as-emotion' melodrama grammar Dolan practices.
- A Fantastic Woman (2017) — Builds a trans-led melodrama around Almodóvarian surrealist eruptions — gale-force wind, mirror and dance fantasias — and casts a trans actress, answering Laurence's craft and its cis-casting debate at once.
- The Danish Girl (2015) — A period-set transgender-identity melodrama that leans on painterly costume and design as emotional signifiers, and became the flashpoint sibling to Laurence's cis-casting controversy.
- Girlhood (2014) — Its centerpiece — the girls miming Rihanna's 'Diamonds' in blue light — is a Dolan-style needle-drop set-piece where a pop song and suspended movement hold the whole emotional weight of the scene.