Ville-Marie

The movie starts with a slap in the face, it grabs you and never lets you go until the very end. It's an ensemble film portrayed as a wonderful puzzle whose pieces all fall perfectly in place one into another.

My first fear before seeing it was that Monica Bellucci would steal the show and make for an unequal movie, where too much focus would be on one character. In truth, she does stand out a bit, but the reason is simple : she's an outsider, a foreign actress who comes to Montreal to shoot a movie, whereas most of the other characters are Montrealers having more "mainstream" jobs : a student, a paramedic and a nurse. These 4 characters all end up in Ville-Marie hospital, for different reasons, hence the title of the movie.

I was really impressed to see how the cast felt so natural, as if the actors were born to play these roles. I'm impressed how the scenarist and the director managed to give so much depth to these characters, which is always a concern in ensemble films, because each have much less screen time to build their personality.

I'm trying, but I really can't find much negative about this movie. Maybe some scenes about Aliocha Schneider's character, Thomas, are a bit long... But they do serve a purpose: to build his personality.

Watch this movie out in the film festival circuit, I predict a bright future for it.