La turbulence des fluides

This is not a 'great' film from Quebec but I find it worth my time. At places it was uneven, but the storyline and the characters portrayed in the film are interesting enough to hold my attention throughout.

Acting by actress Pascale Bussières was a bit constraint at times but she was fairly convincing as a scientist with a troubled past. The opening of the film showed her working in Tokyo but this portion of the plot is later on proved to be totally unnecessary and irrelevant to the story.

The film has other shortcoming too. But if you keep in mind this is a low-budget art film, you will still get quite a bit of enjoyment out of it.

When I saw the trailer of the movie and read the synopsis, I thought "Wow! This is going to be such a great movie!", but let me tell you I did not get what I was expecting.

The movie is a never-ending circle: at each time there is a new element, it ends up just like the other one before "because it's a movie about the resemblance of love and the tides, the sea" (as Manon Briand said herself in French when I saw her). It was a falsely profound movie, falling into total esotericism.

There were some funny parts, but the movie was not a comedy. The scenery was nice and the quality of the images was good too. The actors were good, but they were playing characters for whom I was unable to develop any kind of sympathy.

I believe this movie will be appreciated by many (and I was already proven that), but I think it's only OK to watch but not great at all.

[Actually, Luc Besson did about nothing in the movie. It was only his studio that helped a bit at realizing the film.]

A beautiful, thought-provoking and sexy film about what happens when a seismologist returns to her home town to investigate the mysterious cessation of the tide.

This movie surprised and intrigued me. I never knew where it was going, but I was satisfied by where it took me. The opening sequence alone (set in Tokyo) was worth the price of admission.

Funny and tragic at the same moment.

I can see why Pascal Bussiere is a star in Quebec. She brings us into her story even as her character holds the world at arm's length. When she began to feel the effects of the tidal disturbance, I felt them too.

I found director Manon Briand articulate and charming when she came to the Vancouver International Film Festival, but by then I had already seen and fallen in love with her movie.

This one is definitely worth watching.

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.

This movie is unbelievably corny, and it's pretty disappointing at the end. I didn't mind it for most of the movie, but I was sort of appalled come the end--or, rather, a few minutes before the end, when the whole thing comes to wrap (or, in my opinion, completely unravel).

In fact, this movie is what inspired me to finally register at IMDb to write a review.

Julie Gayet earns the first three stars. The fourth goes to the rest of the cast and a fifth to the overall production being decent.

But yeah, this script seemed to be written by a high school junior who just got dumped and was trying to woo back his love...or otherwise attempting--and failing fantastically--to be profound.