Francis (Xavier Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri) are close friends. One day, during a lunch, they meet Nicolas (Niels Schneider), a young man from the country newly arrived in town.

As one rendezvous leads troublingly to another – whether real or imagined, the signs are all bad – each of the two friends slides deeper into obsessive fantasies around the same object of desire. And the deeper they slide, the more their once cast-iron friendship begins to crack under the pressure of competing for the new kid on the block.

Xavier Dolan’s second film, Heartbeats, is a study of the fall into love. We follow each stage of the typical love story’s progress – it starts with a meeting and ends in tears. The film reveals a fundamentally simple intrigue that careers through a whole gamut of poetic craziness: passions unleashed, expectations, sorrow, humiliation and, finally, loneliness.