Laurence Anyways 2012

Laurence Anyways

Laurence Anyways

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About Laurence Anyways 💬

• Can their love survive this?

In the '90s, Laurence Emmanuel James Alia (Melvil Poupaud) tells his girlfriend Fred Bellair (Suzanne Clément) that he wants to become a woman.

In spite of the odds, in spite of each other, they confront the prejudices of their friends, ignore the council of their families, and brave the phobias of the society they offend.

For 10 years, they try to live through this transition, and embark on a journey which, unbeknownst to them, may cost Fred and Laurence their love.

• DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

In the 90s, I lived with my mother in suburban Montreal. At school, I was a child star, privileged to miss classes to act in a commercial or a film every once and while. From the perspective of my peers, I was in show business. The truth was that my relationship to the cinema was superficial: besides the Disney classics, my initiation to the seventh art was limited to efficient and soulless Hollywood blockbusters, dubbed into French, which my father would take me to see (often to appreciate the dubbing, which was how he made his living). My mother was never pleased about these excursions, suspicious of the influence these films had on me. Later, I would come to believe she might have blamed them for my adolescent violence and indiscipline.

In spite of all that, it was my mother who took me to my cinematic baptism. In December of 1997, I was 9 years old, and my mother brought me to the, regrettably now defunct, theater Le Parisien. Throughout the course of that evening, I felt as though I was experiencing all the "firsts" that life has to offer in hyperspeed: I fell in love with a man, a woman, costumes, design, images... I felt the shivers that accompany a genuinely great story, ambitious, told with respect for the rules of art, intelligent, epic and sensational.

This cinematic shock cannot be overstated, and I knew that I needed in that moment to learn English as fast as possible, so that I too could act in American movies. It was also at this point in my life that I started dressing up in my mother's clothes more often, more seriously, and without her ever preventing me. I spent more and more time my imagination, eschewing a real-world in which I found myself disliked by other kids my own age, collecting false friends due to my notoriety and creating an isolating shell of arrogance. This cinematic shock was, I realized only recently, a revelation: not only did I know that I wanted to be an actor and a director, but, like this amazing film I had just seen, I wanted my projects, my dreams, to be limitless, and I wanted the unsinkable love I had witnessed on the screen to one day be mine.

Fifteen years later, I watch LAURENCE ANYWAYS, and I see my childhood still secretly at play. To be clear, I do not wish to become a woman, and my film is an homage to the ultimate love story: ambitious, impossible, the love we want to be sensational, boundless, the love that we don't dare hope for, the love that only cinema, books and art provide.

LAURENCE ANYWAYS is an homage to the time in my life, before I became a director, when I had to become a man.

Xavier Dolan

Laurence Anyways Movie Details 🎥

Directed by

Xavier Dolan

Writing Credits

Xavier Dolan

Starring

Melvil Poupaud

Suzanne Clément

Nathalie Baye

Vincent Davy

Monia Chokri

Sophie Faucher

Yves Jacques

Gilles Renaud

Patrice Coquereau

Monique Spaziani

Emmanuel Schwartz

Catherine Bégin

Patricia Tulasne

Perrette Souplex

Jacques Lavallée

Magalie Lépine Blondeau

David Savard

Anne-Élisabeth Bossé

Violette Chauveau

Jacob Tierney

Mylène Jampanoï

Susan Almgren

Xavier Dolan

Music by

Noia

Cinematography by

Yves Bélanger

Genres: Drama, Romance

Countries: Canada, France

Laurence Anyways Official Trailer

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