The intense roll-out for the Quebec release of Les Amours imaginaires (Heartbeats) is almost over and 21-year-old filmmaker, Xavier Dolan — whose life and work has been a Quebec media obsession since the film’s debut in Cannes — is talked out.

”I am not made for the promotional lifestyle. Interviews seem out of character for me. I love to create things with my hands, or my mind…. I hate talking about myself and my work,” Dolan tells Playback Daily. ”I made the film for people to feel less alone. I hope they laugh or cry. They can stay or leave. But I didn’t make it for me to brag about this and that and talk about what influences me.”

The visually rich film, which won the Regards Jeunes prize at Cannes, tells the story of friends Francis (Dolan) and Marie (Monia Chokri) who fall in love with the elusive Adonis Nicholas (Niels Schneider). A dramatic comedy, Heartbeats follows Francis and Marie as they battle for Nicholas’s attention.

Dolan wrote the screenplay on the train to the Toronto Film Festival last September to attend the screening of J’ai tue ma mere (I Killed My Mother), which garnered the young director three prizes at the Cannes Film Festival and a trio of Jutra Awards. Mother drew nearly one million at the box office.

Dolan made the $1.6 million Heartbeats with private investors (who used film tax credits) but no help from government funding agencies.

While some critics see traces of Woody Allen, Jean-Luc Godard and Pedro Almodovor in Dolan’s latest work, others say the screenplay lacks depth.

For the filmmaker, Heartbeats is an experiment with visual language. ‘I wanted to put emphasis on the fact that the encounter in the film is nothing beyond an image, a fabulation, a vain fantasy. The characters fall in love with an idea of being in love but not with the person. And that made me want to explore the surfaces, the images, the graphic side of love more than a too-deep, dense and ostentatious splash of emotions.”

The film is produced by Daniel Morin, Carole Mondello and Dolan and distributed by Remstar. No date for a release in English Canada has been set.