Toto The Hero (1991)

Directed by Jaco Van Dormael, who also directed The Eighth Day and Mr Nobody, this Belgian film is a bitter­sweet fable of lost love and missed oppor­tun­ities (subtitled “How to Mess Up Your Life”) that follows its prot­ag­onist liter­ally from the cradle to the grave.

The story told in flash­back, is about an embittered and lonely old man who is convinced that his whole life has been ‘stolen’ from him due to a mix up during a fire at the hospital where he was born. It is the boy next door, hand­some and successful, who is the thief and who wins the girl he is in love with. The old man plots revenge.

WORLD OF THE STORY

The world of Toto is a blend of the natur­al­istic and the hyper-real; inviting us to share in the fantasies of the main char­acter, and super­fi­cially seems to belong to the school of ‘magic realism’ that features in box-office hits like the whim­sical Amelie. But it has much darker over­tones: loss, disap­point­ment, a crip­pling sense of futility.

The sequence excerpted here, however, belongs to one of its lighter moments: the old man remem­bering the unique perspective of his child­hood which is presented in the style of a children’s matinee show. It follows a theme that is threaded through the film and helps to lend it an unex­pected depth of feeling.

It is diffi­cult to convey how a child sees the world without being patron­ising or senti­mental. This is one of the best attempts at it on screen.

© David Clough 2010