After enduring the extended ennui and contrived symmetries of Sorrentino's gutless outing (Youth), I find myself engrossed in this equally stylised exploit from Dolan that eclipses the sterile exuberance of his Italian colleague. When Laurence walks down the halls to teach his class, the camera lingers on the looks of the college denizens, each one secretly wishing they had her balls to claim their petty freedom: her transformation reveals the prison of their conformity. Deep down, outcasts like Laurence are envied by the very people who ostracise them. As Laurence tells her delighted male colleague in the canteen on her first day as a woman: "It's not revolt, it's revolution." Insects pass through phases of complex metamorphosis: egg, larva, pupa, imago. Just-born foals stand up several minutes after birth; it takes humans months to get on their feet, and years to stop puking and crapping themselves; seventy years later they begin all that again, and can barely walk. Where Sorrentino's actors, brave as may be, were mouthing their lines in Youth, here the acting is taut, layered and some scenes appear ad-libbed, even. Fred's raw outburst at the owner of the trendy "Saturday Brunch" bar reminded me of the cataclysmic once-in-a-lifetime scene of Alice Houri in "La Graine et le Moulet" (2007, Abdellatif Kechiche), which lasts nearly six minutes. Like the Graine, this is cinema at its finest: a story told with immense generosity to the players, and to any audience with ears to hear and eyes to see.
Review of Laurence Anyways
