In-between states: Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz and Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways

Two recent films by young Canadian directors, deal with characters entangled in in-between states. Margot in Sarah Polley's Take This Waltz is caught between her comfortable marriage and her passionate affair with a neighbour, while Laurence in Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways is more radically unsettled by his decision to become a woman. Both films lay themselves open to accusations of superficiality, by drawing on the conventions of romantic comedy (Take This Waltz) or by a flamboyantly melodramatic style (Laurence Anyways), but both work to unsettle easy assumptions about the relations of surface and depth, image and self, fantasy and bodily reality.