Quebec’s 20-year-old prodigy Xavier Dolan just put the polishing edit on his $1.6 million sophomore feature Heartbreaker and is already casting the ‘impossible love’ story Laurence Anyways, a copro with France budgeted at $6.5 million.

In a phone interview from his native Montreal, Dolan says Laurence Anyways is about ‘impossible love,’ in this case for a couple where one is a transsexual.

‘It’s actually more of a love story [than a sex-change operation story],’ Dolan emphasizes. ‘We don’t even get to see the sex change. It’s an element that’s really in the background, but the main plot focuses on the impossible love between these two… and one who tries to survive the transformation.’

Dolan, who writes and directs Laurence, says the film is ‘not as intimate as [his first feature] I Killed My Mother. My writing will always be kind of empirical, but it doesn’t mean I’ve lived everything I’m writing about. I’m not a transsexual, so Laurence is not based on my life.’

Carole Mondello – Dolan’s production manager and line producer on all three of his features – says Laurence will be produced by Lyse Lafontaine of Equinoxe Productions and talks are underway for Suzanne Clément (I Killed My Mother; It’s Not Me, I Swear!) to play the lead and 26-year-old French actor Louis Garrel (La belle personne) to play both the man and woman if the project gets a green light.

‘We [submit the project for consideration] in August to SODEC and Telefilm [Canada], and we’ll know by the end of the fall’ if the project gets accepted, explains Mondello, adding that ideally, Laurence would go to camera in February 2011 in Montreal and the surrounding area for winter scenes.

Laurence would mark the first time Dolan finances a production with public funding. (SODEC only funded post-production in the total $800,000 budget for Mother.)

Mondello says the $1.6 million budget for Heartbreakers (Les amours imaginaires) includes tax-credit coin, but ‘was made possible by three very generous private investors.’ She says that Remstar has all Canadian distrib rights and France’s Rezo Films has the rest of the world.

Dolan wrote, coproduced, directed, stars in and edited Heartbreaker, which will be ready for Cannes – the French Riviera festival that put him on the map – although it has yet to be submitted to the Official Competition.

He says Heartbreaker ‘is really a movie about the deterioration of friendship and the humiliation we impose on ourselves when we blindly and desperately fall in love with ambiguous people. It is a chaptered film actually, on the various steps of the love downfall.’

Dolan insists ‘it’s not really a triangle because the object of desire is not part of the story, as he would be if it were some kind of a Jules et Jim,’ referring to François Truffaut’s classic. ‘It’s a love duel between two friends who become infatuated with the same person and actually jeopardize their friendship.’

The busy cineaste is also currently acting in director-friend Jacob Tierney’s sophomore feature Notre Dame de Grace. And he’s hoping I Killed My Mother will find the same kind of success in English Canada that it enjoyed in Quebec, where it made $988,659 at the box office. K-Films Amérique opened Mother on Feb. 5 on two screens in Toronto and will roll it out across Canada in major cities through March.

And for anyone who has yet to see Mother, perhaps the most incredible thing about this debut feature is the universality of its teenage angst despite the intensely personal vision and age of its maker. In short, it’s astonishing that a 20-year-old French-Canadian filmmaker can make a fortysomething straight English female actually identify 100% with a 17-year-old gay male protagonist.

‘I’m always surprised and flattered by that,’ Dolan says genuinely. ‘I made no attempt to reach out to any specific public. I thought this is personal – maybe only young adults like me are going to understand it, but it turned out that the general public wasn’t so narrow. People loved it, and I’m always surprised by that.’

That Dolan has managed to convey such a ‘narrow’ POV plight so effortlessly to the ‘general public’ in a debut feature is among the reasons he has won accolades around the world, including three prizes at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes and the Toronto Film Critics’ Jay Scott award for best emerging filmmaker.