Toi

A juvenile film about superficial angst. The main character, a self-absorbed woman, takes up with a lover and leaves her husband, which gets her all knotted up, drunk and abusive. We are expected to suffer with her for more than an hour. Merci non, madame.

Many of us have been through marriage breakup. We did not get drunk, have promiscuous sex, slash our wrists or abuse our children in the process.

The subtle process of couples drifting apart has been done infinitely better before -- check out Scenes from a Marriage by Bergman, an adult.

The cinematography was competent.

The actors are amazing and the director beyond brilliant.

An absolute must-see.

A gorgeous odyssey, verging on the unreal and fantastic, into the heart of modern despair.

Anne-Marie Cadieux delivers what may be the best performance of her career.

Delisle has orchestrated a visceral, modern fairy tale that echoes a grueling existential quest.

The directing, mirroring the subject's urgency, avoids gimmickry of any kind to focus constantly on the essential.

Let's take a boring story about a 40ish woman who leaves husband and son for her lover.

Let's have a few explicit, but un-sexy sex scenes and mix it up with second thoughts, booze, abuse of every kind and shoot a 75 minutes movie about all that.

Wait: A 75 minutes running time is very long ! We don't have enough content to bore you for that long.

So let's make the lover a sound engineer. That way we can insert a few crappy songs that are loosely connected to the narrative. Let's also have a few club scenes, so we can insert crappy techno music and show our unhappy protagonists dancing.

Also, since the movie's in french, why not have the main character talk on the phone in English with one of her friends. That way, we can please the Anglo market and, at the same time, serve some philosophical "good advice" to our troubled main character.

Still not quite 75 minutes ? Let's overstretch the short credits (nicely designed white text on a black background without any sound).

Hey ! What do you know ! Now we have a bad movie that's almost 80 minutes long ! And guess what ? It seems like 180 minutes.

Anne-Marie Cadieux's a fearless actress. Not because she has some raw, naked, sex scenes, but because she's in that clunker. Quebec's cinema is plagued by "auteurs" who go against the trend and try to offer daring, clever movies but fail miserably, mainly because they go and shoot a script that feels like a first draft. A first draft without an ending.

"Toi" is not very clever and it thinks it's daring. But let's face it: it takes more than raw sex to be daring. Next time Francois Delisle decides to make a movie with such a great cast, I hope he won't mistake "open ending" with "No ending". Let's also hope he spares us his horrible amateurish music...

Exploiting sex to sell a bad script is the trade of bad filmmakers.