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Whistling tunes, we hide in the dunes by the seaside
Last night I showed my class Toto the Hero (Toto le héros), an incredible Belgian film from the early '90's. Thomas Van Haserbroeck is a man who has always believed that he was accidentally swapped at birth in a hospital fire: he should have had the life of Alfred Kant, his wealthy neighbors' son. Now an old man in a rest home, Thomas mulls over his life in fitful, fantastic, free-associative scraps and plans his revenge on this usurper of his life, the man who stole all his adventures and condemned him to live out his days as a complete nonentity. There is an odyssey ahead, of course, but can you really come home to someone else's life—even if it's your own?
This is not a linear film. As a child, Thomas is a skinny, wistful dreamer nicknamed "Van Chickensoup," who throws pocketknives like a pro and projects his life onto ancient Egypt and gangster films. Grown up into an introverted surveyor, he's unexpectedly handsome in his sweater vests and heavy glasses, but disconnected: trapped not only in the wrong life, but on the wrong planet. An old man who hates old people, he smokes his covert cigarettes with an air of immense defiance and no longer seems to care, if he ever could tell, where his real life ends and his fictions begin. Because of the way the storyline constantly slips and doubles back through time, we meet these three versions of the same man essentially at once. The plot is full of convergence and refraction, so that the supernatural may not be at work, but eerie coincidence will do just as well.* It's a beautifully strange piece of work, comic as though in spite of itself, blackly sentimental, and the only movie I've ever seen that reminded me simultaneously of Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen and City of Lost Children and Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop. I'm only sorry it doesn't seem to exist on DVD: I'd buy it in a heartbeat otherwise.
It's bright and sunny and cold outside, with buds on the trees and new snow on the ground. The sky looks like winter; the light looks like spring. I still like autumn better.
*In this respect and a few others, Toto the Hero would make a good double feature with Hitchcock's Vertigo.
This is not a linear film. As a child, Thomas is a skinny, wistful dreamer nicknamed "Van Chickensoup," who throws pocketknives like a pro and projects his life onto ancient Egypt and gangster films. Grown up into an introverted surveyor, he's unexpectedly handsome in his sweater vests and heavy glasses, but disconnected: trapped not only in the wrong life, but on the wrong planet. An old man who hates old people, he smokes his covert cigarettes with an air of immense defiance and no longer seems to care, if he ever could tell, where his real life ends and his fictions begin. Because of the way the storyline constantly slips and doubles back through time, we meet these three versions of the same man essentially at once. The plot is full of convergence and refraction, so that the supernatural may not be at work, but eerie coincidence will do just as well.* It's a beautifully strange piece of work, comic as though in spite of itself, blackly sentimental, and the only movie I've ever seen that reminded me simultaneously of Jeunet and Caro's Delicatessen and City of Lost Children and Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop. I'm only sorry it doesn't seem to exist on DVD: I'd buy it in a heartbeat otherwise.
It's bright and sunny and cold outside, with buds on the trees and new snow on the ground. The sky looks like winter; the light looks like spring. I still like autumn better.
*In this respect and a few others, Toto the Hero would make a good double feature with Hitchcock's Vertigo.
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