La turbulence des fluides

When I saw this was a movie produced by Luc Besson, I was reluctant to see it, because his choices are obviously not mine. But the topics and the Canadian location made me see it anyway. And, for the first time, a Besson production (through his company Europa Corp.) is a movie worth seeing! Amazing! Of course, you can't go without the obsessive Asian sub-plot Besson seems to put in all the movies he produced (is it in the writer's contract to add it???), but the slow pace of action and the ethereal music takes you in quite an interesting universe.

A good surprise, then, that I don't recommend to fans of other Besson productions (Watch out: No martial arts and no poor dialogs in this movie!!!).

Here is a film that starts with a great deal of promise and winds up leaving the viewer miserable, thirsting for a real ending.

If you are like me you will wonder if the producers of this film got government money to splurge on a trip to Tokyo. I suspect that was the only reason those expensive opening scenes could have been shot there. The Japanese scenes didn't make a bit of difference to the film and could have been faked for a lot less money.

As Canadian films go this one is really no different. Too much dialogue and pretensions to be an important work of film making. The plot seems to be some sort of Twin Peaks reincarnation, but without the real intrigue. As the movie plods along with some silly investigations of the quasi paranormal the viewer is lulled into a sense that nothing is going to happen. And really nothing does.

Then too late in the film an extremely important scene, perhaps the pivotal scene in a newspaper office comes along. By this point you'll be so bored you might miss it. The direction so dull that what should have been an extremely dramatic turning point, with intense lighting and close-ups and a sensible pace to allow us to absorb the importance of this scene. But no, it's an over lit room with a cliche newspaper editor. Who ever heard of a newspaper office in this day and age keeping a clipping file for a specif ic story? Even in Quebec they use computers. The whole film suffers from this kind of lack of attention to detail. Do they expect us to believe this stuff? Script doctor required.

The film might be about sex, or love, but it's so catholic and reserved about the sex it's something that no one at Disney would blush over. Count the kisses..are there two in the whole film?

The female lead is struggling with some deeply seated emotional trauma and this apparently is causing her to be callously casual about sex on one hand and in a bizarre turn around later, suffer a schoolgirl crush....madly trying to locate the object of her desire. The male "lead" if you can call someone who gets 15 minutes of screen time a lead, comes across one minute as a devil-may-care, jaunty risk-taker and then later he claims to be "shy". This kind of unexplained inconsistent character may be realistic to the director but for the viewer this guy comes across as a goof who acts like a sexy guy one minute and a fool the next.

The film could have been reduced by about a half hour and several characters cut without losing anything. In fact it would have been tighter and better paced if the editor had been a bit more ruthless. There are some puerile dabblings with a lesbian sub-plot which really goes nowhere. Incidently who ever heard of a police woman kissing a member of their own sex in a squad car. Then there's the singing nuns. That's how weird this movie can get. Oh did I mention the fact that the lead cannot swim? Who ever heard of this? She must be a rare creature indeed. The writers should learn that you can only stretch the disbelief of the audience so far---then it snaps and the whole film begins to look infantile.

The best guess is the writers decided they wanted to have some fun time in Japan so they wrote that in. They also wanted a nude scene, so they gave the lead the improbable role of a non-swimmer. You'll notice the male lead is never naked. Men always have time to get dressed before they panic. Women seem to be slow-dressers.

There is something distressingly childish about the direction of this film. Canadians aren't really this afraid of love and sex are they? If you last until the credits roll you may be just as disappointed as me. Another low for Canadian film making.

This film has a lot of good things going for it. The cinematography is awesome if too artificial at times. Some of the takes are too clearly references to classic images but still make for a nice overall look. The acting is generally convincing and precise although a few lines drops the ambiance too abruptly.

The plot itself is interesting if taken as an artistic process. Suspension of disbelief helps greatly as it's best to immerse oneself in the overall experience rather than nitpick on details. Quite a few counterfactual errors are to be expected in such situations. In a way, this could have been a great film if some things had been taken out. At times, the viewer is spoon-fed an interpretation of the "poetry" of the film. Letting the art speak for itself would have helped greatly.

For some reason, the same is true of the previews. Simply put, they seem to say too much although it's hard to tell what effect they would have on someone who knows nothing of the movie.

Let's hope that, next time, Manon Briand will let her artistic sense free and not impose it on the viewer.

In the warm and humorous Quebecois film, Chaos and Desire, shown at last year's Vancouver Film Festival, Alice Bradley, played by the lovely Pascale Bussieres, is a seismologist working in Japan studying the factors that can predict earthquakes. When the tides mysteriously stop flowing on the St. Lawrence River in her hometown of Baie Comeau, she returns to investigate and comes up against the bizarre behavior of local residents. In one instance, a little Chinese girl (Ji-Yan Séguin) sleepwalks every night at the exact same time. In others, a woman chops down every tree in her front yard, and the phone number of a fire-fighting pilot named Marc Vandal (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) has been ripped out of every phone book in town.

Running from a troubled past and consumed by loneliness, Alice must now deal not only with the problem of the tides but with a growing involvement with Vandal and the not so subtle advances of her journalist friend Catherine (Julie Gayet). When Alice uncovers the film's central mystery, the presumed drowning of Vandal's wife, the investigation turns away from science to the world of spirit and achieves a resolution of surprising power.

Well, I probably anticipated something more with this one. Or perhaps something else. Coming from Roger Frappier, producer of Maelstrom, and director Manon Briand (of Cosmos fame), I expected something more along the lines of Denis Villineuve or Andre Turpin. In other words, something New-Wavey, fresh, and arty. You do get something visually lavish, containing some great humour, and a nicely understated performed from Pascal Bussieres. However, you also get some trite sentimentality, poorly constructed religious iconography, and the overall feeling of something poppy and mainstream. There's nothing wrong with that, and I'm sure that this film will do very well with domestic audiences (I'm speaking of Quebec, primarily). But it hardly makes for the challenging, satisfying artistic experience of "Maelstrom" and "Un Crabe dans la Tete." Maybe I'm expecting too much. Or something it was never intended to be.