What a freaking movie. So many twists and turns. Absolutely intense from start to finish.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is not a 'great' film from Quebec but I find it worth my time. At places it was uneven, but the storyline and the characters portrayed in the film are interesting enough to hold my attention throughout.Acting by actress Pascale Bussières was a bit constraint at times but she was fairly convincing as a scientist with a troubled past. The opening of the film showed her working in Tokyo but this portion of the plot is later on proved to be totally unnecessary and irrelevant to the story.The film has other shortcoming too. But if you keep in mind this is a low-budget art film, you will still get quite a bit of enjoyment out of it.

When I saw the trailer of the movie and read the synopsis, I thought "Wow! This is going to be such a great movie!", but let me tell you I did not get what I was expecting.The movie is a never-ending circle: at each time there is a new element, it ends up just like the other one before "because it's a movie about the resemblance of love and the tides, the sea" (as Manon Briand said herself in French when I saw her). It was a falsely profound movie, falling into total esotericism.There were some funny parts, but the movie was not a comedy. The scenery was nice and the quality of the images was good too. The actors were good, but they were playing characters for whom I was unable to develop any kind of sympathy.I believe this movie will be appreciated by many (and I was already proven that), but I think it's only OK to watch but not great at all.[Actually, Luc Besson did about nothing in the movie. It was only his studio that helped a bit at realizing the film.]

In the warm and humorous Quebecois film, Chaos and Desire, shown at last year's Vancouver Film Festival, Alice Bradley, played by the lovely Pascale Bussieres, is a seismologist working in Japan studying the factors that can predict earthquakes. When the tides mysteriously stop flowing on the St. Lawrence River in her hometown of Baie Comeau, she returns to investigate and comes up against the bizarre behavior of local residents. In one instance, a little Chinese girl (Ji-Yan Séguin) sleepwalks every night at the exact same time. In others, a woman chops down every tree in her front yard, and the phone number of a fire-fighting pilot named Marc Vandal (Jean-Nicolas Verreault) has been ripped out of every phone book in town. Running from a troubled past and consumed by loneliness, Alice must now deal not only with the problem of the tides but with a growing involvement with Vandal and the not so subtle advances of her journalist friend Catherine (Julie Gayet). When Alice uncovers the film's central mystery, the presumed drowning of Vandal's wife, the investigation turns away from science to the world of spirit and achieves a resolution of surprising power.

This beautifully photographed film tells the story of a scientist woman trying to explain an unusual phenomenon taken place in the Saint-Lawrence river in a recluse region of northern Quebec. Her work will take her to a journey she was not expecting which primarily deals with her own private longings. Some may say that the film takes way too long to get to the point which, from that perspective, must be the love story. Others may argue the exact opposite; that the love story is secondary to the natural disaster plot it therefore dilutes. I tend to believe that both stories are moving along at the same rate which is fairly slow and might even be perceived as hesitant. The overall effect is one of a very well done piece of cinema with a powerful dramatic finale but also of an almost lazy script that should have went through a couple more rewrites. In short, an uneven film with still lots of charm.