Thomas, now an old man in a retirement home, recounts his life: as a little kid, Thomas lives with his sister Alice and brother with a Down syndrome, while their father disappeared on a plane during bad weather. Thomas imagines that he was switched as an infant in the maternity ward with his neighbor boy, Alfred. Thomas is infatuated with Alice and jealous of her affections towards Alfred. Alice wants to prove her loyalty by burning Alfred's home with a gasoline canister, but due to an accident, she dies in the fire. As a grown up, Thomas meets Evelyne who looks remarkably like Alice, but she is Alfred's wife. In the present, Thomas wants to kill Alfred. While hiding in a shack, he overhears that a gangster will assassinate Alfred in his home that evening. Thomas thus locks up Alfred, takes on his clothes and appears in his house. The assassin shoots through the window and thus kills Thomas instead of Alfred.
The feature length debut film of the Belgian cinematic hope of that time, Jaco Van Dormael's "Toto the Hero" is an unusual and creative film presented in a dispersed nonlinear narrative that flip-flops between the childhood, adulthood and old life of protagonist Thomas, but it still seems as if he "polished" and improved this concept more in his later film "Mr. Nobody". The episodes involving these three timelines in Thomas' life are interesting, though somewhat inconclusive in the end without a stronger point. The best bits are surreal comical scenes which, together with this storyline told out of chronological order, make this ordinary story more extraordinary and fresh (the mother is seen with blood dripping from beneath her hat in a grocery store, the people all gather around her and call the ambulance, but then the clerk takes her hat off—and it is revealed she was hiding a piece of raw meat on her head; when her dad's plane disappears, the 13-year old Alice goes inside a church and threatens a statue of Holy Mary (!) by saying: "We came to warn you! If our dad isn't found, you'll have to answer to me!"; the old Thomas attaches a lightbulb with a metal foil on a lamp, and when the security guard turns it on, it explodes, causing a short circuit in the retirement home, thereby allowing Thomas to escape). The "twist ending" isn't that well thought out (the viewers are led to believe one thing already in the opening scenes, only for Van Dormael to have this subverted) whereas a couple of 'autistic' ideas and situations make the film less comprehensible than it should have been, though the director has talent and skill, showing jealousy, confusion and disappointment in life from cradle to grave, never allowing to compromise and create a pleasant 'feelgood' film.
Grade:++
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