Toto the Hero (1991)

I saw this film believing it to be comedy and less than halfway through felt deeply antagonistic to the director's idea of humour. A few minutes later, I realised my mistake and wept through the remainder of the film and again when I saw it next, and again! It is a story of a deeply flawed man with profoundly complex issues, some of which you can understand from his family history. As to whether he was switched at birth during a fire, or whether that was his way as a child of rationalising the inequalities between himself and his neighbour's child, that is open to question. His relationship with Evelyn and the way he identifies her with his dead sister, Alys, is a kind of idealisation. I am not entirely sure how much of the film is real and how much is wishful thinking on the part of Thomas. But whenever the theme music plays, the mood becomes both happy and sad.

Cu-Top said it all. Only thing I can add is that it seems to start slowly and, if you have a prejudice against self-absorbed European (especially French) movies, this might suggest just another Celt trying to fellate himself.Instead, it turns out to be a virtually perfect story of self-deception and the choices that back-fire as a result, told at a deliberate pace, and which you care about because we all share some level of that deception.Again, Cu-Top's review hits the mark; take this little gem seriously.Another line.Another line.Another line.Why does IMDb insist on ten lines?

The only gripe I have with this film is the ending? Does it really necessary to make the rich kid with the 'good life' to envy the less fortunate one's for his 'freedom'? To get the protagonist killed to prove a point? Maybe the writing here is more of self expression than depicting human condition in general? Loud volume doesn't make the music more significant. Perhaps something could have left unsaid to the audience's imagination...I always liked the French movies for there seemingly understated fashion over the dog barks of moral debate and preaching of the Anglo-American types - assuming the viewer is deaf and dumb. Well, the movie's ending is a bit surprise to me. Instead of letting the actors barking at each other, it chose to create a big bang with its twisted story line in the end. I certainly saw it coming after the middle point of the film. But still, I'd have no problem giving it 10 had it not been for the forced ending. I thought the biggest tragedy for people like Toto is that they never got anything right and nobody cares what they do or do not do. Therefore, to force Alfred to 'envy' Toto in the end and let Toto leave with a bang instead of a wimp is certainly gratifying to the audience, Hollywood style. But it feels very concocted and unnatural. Trying to force a tragedy into a comedy really is pointless. Because life really do sucks for folks like Toto.

Toto the Hero is one of those rare films that improves with each viewing (and you will want to watch it again and again) there are enough levels going on to satisfy the hardened movie deconstructionist but at the same time the story-telling is engagingly simple and seemingly naive. At the surface level a narrative of lost love, mistaken identity, family tragedy, life/death and tulips. Dig deeper and there is a complex reflexive subtext about language and subject identity that encompasses philosophy, psychoanalysis and the role of the media itself. Joyce, Levi Strauss, Freud and Lacan are cited alongside countless references to cinema and television. Watch the opening of Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard or read the first page of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man after Toto and you may catch my drift. A truly superb piece of cinema that skillfully manages to avoid the post-modern posturing that condemns many of Van Dormael's contemporaries.