Twenty-four-year-old Canadian wunderkind Xavier Dolan has hit on an ingenious and timely obstacle for his latest film’s central couple. Poet and teacher Laurence (Melvil Poupaud) loves Frederique, called Fred (Suzanne Clément) with all his heart, but Laurence is suffering. He isn’t a man, he tells Fred; he’s meant to be a woman, and at age 35 that’s what he intends to become.
At first Fred’s dismayed, of course, but she loves Laurence too much not to try to make things work. One of the best things about Dolan’s screenplay is the way he confines the prejudice Laurence encounters (most of the movie takes place in the late ’80s and early ’90s) to a few pungent, telling episodes. 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.
The fullest scenes are the ones Laurence and Fred share. If Dolan’s film resembles anything, it’s “The Way We Were,” with Laurence’s transgender conflict taking the place of Barbra Streisand’s left-wing politics and with one performance (Clément) considerably stronger than the other (Poupaud). Dolan’s accomplishment, as with that fondly remembered earlier film, is to make you ache for these frustrated would-be lovers.