La turbulence des fluides

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.

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.

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.

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.]

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.