Eye For Film >> Movies >> No (1998) Film Review
No
Reviewed by: Angus Wolfe Murray
Two stories disconnect in this film by French-Canadian playwright, Robert Lepage. An actress (Anne-Marie Cadieux), playing Feydeau farce at Osaka's World Fair in 1970, dines out with the Canadian ambassador (Richard Frechette) and his wife after the show one night. Meanwhile, in Quebec, her boyfriend (Alexis Martin) hangs around a basement apartment with a bunch of losers, building a bomb. There is a visually handicapped Japanese translator (Marie Brassard), who is a friend of the actress and comes out with wise remarks occasionally. She was blinded at Hiroshima, which may be significant.
The actress's response at discovering that she is pregnant is to get drunk and end up in bed with the ambassador. Back home in the basement nothing happens. A couple of, what appear to be, bored detectives stake out a room across the street and keep an eye on "the terrorists".
Whatever the film is trying to say, the answer is "No". The boyfriend's gang are intellectuals playing politics. The actress and her group are not. The shift from black-and-white to colour fails to compensate for bad manners, worse sex and dodgy explosives.
Reviewed on: 19 Jan 2001