I love Xavier Dolan. He’s a (nearly) twenty-two-year-old gay Quebecois auteur, and I’m…none of those things. But he’s always my go-to guy whenever some fellow film geek wants to discuss up-and-coming directors.  Dolan’s got the wunderkind cred, as his first two films showed at Cannes, his first in 2009.  Both Josh and I enjoyed his audacious semi-autobiographical debut I Killed My Mother at SIFF last year.  I think that’s the better of his two releases, but it only ended up doing the film festival circuit, as an American distribution deal was set, but nothing ever came of it.  It ain’t even on Netflix, yo!

But now you’ve got your chance to get a dose of Dolan. His second film Heartbeats–though the directly-translated title Imaginary Lovers is much more on the nose–is running at the Northwest Film Forum twice nightly (7 p.m., 9:15 p.m.) tonight through next Thursday. Here’s what I had to say, upon seeing the film at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival:

From the airport to the hotel and directly to the theater, in order to catch a film that was one of the main goals for this festival: Xavier Dolan’s sophomore release, Heartbeats (Les Amours imaginaires). Since his first film I Killed My Mother (which showed at SIFF this year), the twenty-one-year-old auteur wunderkind has screened his second film at Cannes, is already working on his third (Laurence Anyways), and has an idea for his fourth feature (his first in English, taking place in New York). To which I say: Kiddo, slow down, you’ve got plenty of time.

As with his debut, Dolan wrote, directed, acted, soundtracked, and even had a hand in the gorgeous costumes in Heartbeats, but while he definitely has an eye and an ear for cinema, there really is no there there. The film is ostensibly about a love triangle between Marie (Monia Chokri), Francis (Dolan), and Nicolas (Niels Schneider, who looks like no one so much as Michelangelo’s David). Marie and Francis vie for Nicolas’ affection, accompanied by so much slo-mo and music that even Wes Anderson would cry uncle. Dolan brings much beauty to the film, and while I implicitly trust him as a director and genuinely look forward to what he does next, I just hope that with age comes maturation in the medium.

So yes, it’s visually artful with clothes to die for, and that Italian version of “Bang Bang He Shot Me Down” will be in your head for days.  Certainly well worth it.