MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Toto’: Totally Delightful

“Toto the Hero” isn’t faster than a speeding bullet and doesn’t even try to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Yet in its quietly delightful way it performs an equally superhuman feat: It restores your belief in movies, in the wonders they can accomplish if only their creators had the nerve and verve to try.

A French-language feature from Belgian writer-director Jaco Van Dormael, “Toto Le Heros” (to give it its original title) does all those exhilarating things you’ve probably forgotten a film could do. Bristling with inventive glee, audacious not only in its narrative structure but also in its largeness of spirit and the way it employs a light touch with life’s tragedies, “Toto” is a debut film that attempts to cram absolutely all of existence, the joy and the heartbreak and every one of the ages of man, into a mere 90 minutes of film.

For Van Dormael, a former circus clown with a decade’s worth of award-winning short films behind him, is much more than a natural filmmaker who can bend the medium around his little finger. He is a man unashamed before emotion, unafraid to accept the world as it is, no questions asked--qualities that in some ways place him at the opposite end of things from his troubled protagonist, Thomas van Hasenbroeck, a.k.a. Toto the Hero.

“Toto” (which opens Friday at the Beverly Center Cineplex and the Goldwyn Pavilion, rated PG-13) starts with a literal bang, a gunshot fired through a window, an unknown corpse falling to the floor. “The poor cops, what will they make of all this?” a man’s voice asks, scornfully. “Nobody will think it was me.”

The voice belongs to Thomas (French actor Michel Bouquet), a cranky seventysomething resident of a nursing home, grumbling to himself about revenge as he prepares for bed. “It wasn’t murder, it was taking back what was mine,” he goes on irritably. “The life you stole from me the day I was born.”

For Thomas, it turns out, has always believed that he and Alfred Kant, the well-to-do boy next door and his childhood nemesis, had been switched at birth as the result of a raging maternity ward fire. “God wasn’t paying attention, he was picking his nose,” Thomas grouches on. “I haven’t forgotten a thing, Alfred. You’ve stolen my life and love. Nothing ever happened to me.”

Like many a crank, Thomas, as it turns out, has been overstating things. Despite his protestations, his life has been rather a startling one, and part of the pleasure of “Toto” is the dazzling way Van Dormael, who among other things understands perfectly how children view the world, guides us through where Thomas both man and boy has been.

We meet Alfred, of course, a callow busybody who calls Thomas “van Chickensoup” and in general makes his boy’s life a living hell. Balancing Alfred out on the plus side is Alice, Thomas’ lovely hellion of a sister, a sadly sweet Down’s syndrome brother and their wacky pilot father, a man who delights in playing the infectious French music hall classic “Boum” on the piano. And there is even Toto the Hero, Thomas’ tough secret-agent version of himself, a fantasy character he daydreams about when things get tough.

Van Dormael tells Thomas’ story with a graceful, high-spirited ease, illuminating the often shocking reasons for his grudge by cutting back and forth and back again not simply between Thomas as an old man and Thomas as a boy (Thomas Godet), but also with Thomas as an adult (Jo De Backer using the voice of Bouquet) and even Toto as superhero and various other moments of fantasy and imagination.

Those memories and fantasies are intercut in a clever way that seems random but really isn’t, that in effect presents the events as they jostle each other in the old man’s mind. It’s vivid, bravura filmmaking, and even more impressive because, though it may sound unwieldy, it is totally accessible and audience-friendly. By the time Thomas decides on a course of action, we not only know what has been troubling him, we actually feel it with the same passion he does because we seem to have lived it with him.

Though the details of Thomas’ life and fate are wonderfully unexpected, “Toto’s” considerable success in Europe (it won the Camera d’Or for best first effort at Cannes and recently took France’s Cesar for best foreign film, beating “Dances With Wolves,” “Thelma & Louise” and “The Silence of the Lambs” in the process) is due to much more than sharp plotting and wizardly structure or even the very fine work of veteran French actor Bouquet and the rest of the film’s excellent cast.

The difference is that, unlike many putative cinematic whiz kids, Van Dormael does not check his humanity or his feelings at the door. An unlikely combination of Terry Gilliam and Frank Capra, he understands perfectly the longing to be somebody and right the aching wrongs of a lifetime. Finally, though, “Toto Le Heros” greatest accomplishment is that it reminds you of nothing so much as itself. It is that most elusive of cinematic events, often announced but rarely seen, the arrival of a new talent gifted enough to be deserving of a hero’s welcome.

‘Toto Le Heros’

Michel Bouquet: old Thomas

Jo De Backer: adult Thomas

Thomas Godet: child Thomas

Mirelle Perrier: Evelyne

Sandrine Blancke: Alice

Peter Bohlke: old Alfred

Didier Ferney: adult Alfred

Hugo Harold Harrisson: child Alfred

Fabienne Loriaux: Thomas’ mother

Klaus Schindler: Thomas’ father

A Belgian-French-German co-production, released by Triton Pictures. Director Jaco Van Dormael. Producers Pierre Drout, Dany Geys. Co-producers Phillippe Dussart, Luciano Gloor. Screenplay Jaco Van Dormael. Cinematographer Walther Van Den Ende. Editor Susana Rossberg. Costumes An D’Huys, Anne Van Bree. Music Pierre Van Dormael. Art director Hubert Pouille. Sound Dominique Warnier, Jean-Paul Loublier. Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13