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If humans have animal counterparts, the French must be kitty cats.  Chain-smoking, hyper-intelligent, self-posessed and unmoved by the world, these human-cats are actually so sensitive, so deeply wounded by the day-to-day motion of the ocean that they pile on eccentricities to stronghold their cool exteriors.

Writer/director/actor/costumer/man-cat Xavier Dolan must be intimately aware of this, if not intellectually, because his “Heartbeats” (“Les Amours Imaginaires” in French) is disturbingly powerful in how simple it is.  The story is this:  two best friends, a guy and a girl, fall in love with the same guy, whose sexuality and interest in either of them is punishingly unclear.

Some movies are about big ideas, revolutionary ideas, or high concepts.  Others are simple stories on everlasting themes.  Lust and unrequited love are as old a story as you can find.  It’s like a never-ending film wellspring.  When this kind of story is labeled stale and unoriginal (like in “He’s Just Not That Into You,” “Valentine’s Day” or any other movie that I’m sure comes to mind for you), it’s because the chef mindlessly followed the directions on the back of the script box.  One gets the impression that these overpaid cooks either never lived this heartbreak in their lives, or if they did, they are completely unskilled to convey it.

As in the Uncanny Valley, the idea that human brains reject a CGI rendering of a person, no matter how real it is made to look, the heart has an expert sense of when someone’s being insincere.  That is true of shitty movemaking, and it’s true for falling in love with an impossible man.  It’s when the brain decides to ignore these signals, that unrequited love becomes unstoppable, renewable misery.

This is the unfortunate situation that our poor French-Canadian bastards Francis and Marie find themselves in with the angelic Nicolas (a French blond, curly-haired version of Robert Pattinson).

No one will be seated during the heartbreaking Marshmallow Rain sequence.

We meet the three 20-somethings amidst a party of other silly, giggling, smoking, ready to fall in love 20-somethings.  But right away, we see Francis and Marie as separate from the crowd.  They are cooking away in the kitchen for a party of friends.  Their faces are both beautiful, yes, but something’s off.  They have the unmistakable, freshly struck look of someone who’s gotten their hearts kicked in the ass multiple times, and they’re too brainy or sensitive to shake it off.  Their faces are too honest to hide it.

So, when they notice Nicolas, they are both in sync as their first thought is lust, and an immediate second (and permanent) thought is “ah, shit.”  For the rest of the 90 minutes of the film, during the whole dual courtship of Nicolas, they never for a moment seem genuinely happy.  They look miserable, know this is doomed and are powerless to stop themselves.   When they do smile, it’s a mixed grimace of need and “must fake a look like I’m having a good time so no one will think I’m a lunatic.”

Take the devastating early scene where Nicolas casually mentions that he loves Audrey Hepburn.  At first, Francis and Marie appear not to calculate this.  But at their next rendezvous, the big-eyed, brown-haired Marie shows up looking a liiiittle too much like Audrey.  Oh, this headscarf and sunglasses?  Just something I threw on.

Not that Francis is immune to debasing himself, either.  We see him buying an Audrey poster in the very next scene (he must compete in this escalating arms race with Marie, you know).  As the clerk asks him for his credit card, Francis looks so depressed, we are terrified he might erupt into sobs right there in the supermarket.

And that’s the difference between “Heartbeats” and it’s crappy Jessica-Albaed ilk.  This simple story is LIVED IN.  Watching it, I was so captivated, I almost wished it were less honest.  We follow Francis and Marie from humiliating defeat to humiliating defeat, and I don’t know about you, but more often than not– I BEEN THERE.

The film is definitely French.  It isn’t made like your usual movie.  It isn’t subtle.  There’s big, bold colors, lots of slow-motion, lots of music, lots of artistic touches.  While some detractors have called it a big perfume commercial, I couldn’t disagree more.  There’s real humanity in this.  But if those kind of painterly touches bother you, find another movie because there’s a lot of that here.

Francis and Marie have two sex scenes each (each with two different men that are not Nicolas) that are so brutal to watch, yet so romantic, tender and meaningful it makes other movies’ sex scenes look like your middle school football coach mumbling and stammering his way through a Sex-Ed class.  As it has been for hundreds of years, the French know their romance.

The three acts are broken up by a series of documentary-esque interviews with our protagonists’ contemporaries.  Each one of them tells their own story about how they fell in love and ended up ashamed, regretful and strangely “over it.”  The most hilarious and touching interlude is a cute but nervous girl who explains that she found out way too much about this guy from his Facebook page before she even went on a date with him.  She knew his Dad had a stroke in 2002, where his Mom works, what movies he likes, pieced together what he wants to do with his life, where he lives, what his nicknames are, knew SO MUCH, that if he knew how much she knew, he’d enter the Witness Protection Program.

21-year-old filmmaker Dolan (who plays Francis), has a scary grasp on how people operate.  He’s cute and little (keep in mind– kitty cat), but he has major age behind his eyes.  His Francis is a sweet kid that isn’t wanting for compliments (“Heartbreaker, that’s you,” Nicolas’s dancer mother glamorously tells him), but that sweetness is always threatening to explode.  I’m probably not the first one to compare him to Sal Mineo.

Hair = Gay Hipster + James Dean by way of Sal Mineo + Eraserhead = Heartbreaker, that's you.

I’m sure you can tell by now if this sounds like your kind of movie.  Me, this couldn’t have been more up my alley if it tried.  This was another perfect movie-going experience at the Laemlle Sunset 5 Indie theater (I think the only place in LA this thing’s playing at right now).

I am a notorious hater of movie trailers lately.  I used to adore the previews.  Then somewhere around my college graduation, they started sucking.  ALL THE TIME.  They started revealing too much, not teasing, no flair, apparently all cut together by the same lucky-to-have-his-job asshole.  Every action movie was cut the same, every comedy cut the same, and they seemed to do everything in their power to make the movie look unwatchable.  That might be the movies’ faults as well.

But I’m telling you, I go to the AMC or even Arclight right now, and I guarantee I’m seeing a baker’s dozen piece of shit trailers that I want to send on a one-way trip to outer space.  Not so at the Sunset 5!  In front of “Heartbeats,” I saw six great trailers, no bad ones.  I can’t tell you how long it’s been since I’ve had a perfect moviegoing experience like this.

Speaking of trailers, check the one for “Heartbeats”.  And yes, that is an Italian version of Nancy Sinatra’s “Bang Bang” (featured thrice in the film).  Exquisite.