Picture Claire (2002)

the audience applauded

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

In this film about a (fairly) innocent girl who comes to Toronto, believing her former lover is as deeply in love with her as she is with him, Juliette Lewis shines. Ms Lewis is arguably one of Hollywood's finest and most under-rated actors, and she carries this film with just the right amount of emotion. Gina Gershon. What can you say? Remember in "Out for Justice" when Gino asks her how she's doing, she says: "I can still get it wet." Who can forget a line like that and the gal who said it? Mickey Rourke is often difficult to watch, but always believable and right on the mark. While he can carry a film like "The Wrestler" he also shines in these little cameos that turn up with some frequency. I should mention Tracy Wright as well. She really made me believe she was a jaded Toronto detective. Overall, this is a film that breaks away from the formula Hollywood 3-act film that we've all come to love, or hate, depending. A neat film well worth watching and perhaps more than once.

This is the story of a largely mute French Canadian whose trip to see a one night stand results in her getting mixed up with a smuggling operation gone wrong. The main character risks her life to avoid momentary embarrassment, gives a pep talk to a dog, wanders around the only city in Canada where no one apparently speaks French, has an intense hatred of having her picture taken and frequently fantasizes about being on the Moon.That sounds like the makings of a comedy, right? Unfortunately, Picture Claire is a drama that is all quirky and stylized and sucky.After her apartment is set on fire by a couple of thugs, Claire Beaucage (Juliette Lewis) decides to leave Montreal and ride the bus all night to Toronto. There she hopes to hook up again with Billy Stuart (Kelly Harms), a young photographer she picked up in a Montreal bar one night. Before that happens, Claire winds up in a diner bathroom as smuggler Lily Warden (Gina Gershon) meets an accomplice in the dining area and kills him. Though she doesn't know it, Claire is blamed for the murder and then finds out Billy has a live-in girlfriend. In an amazingly stupid move, Claire ends up swinging from Billy's balcony into the apartment below…which just happens to be where Lily lives. She grabs Lily's purse and flees, unknowingly taking with her the thing Lily was smuggling. As Lily takes off after Claire, two more of Lily's accomplices take off after her and two flatfooted detectives also join in the search for Claire. A lot of lame going hither and yon ensues, resulting in an ending that goes from marginally clever to hugely idiotic in about 15 seconds.The best thing about Picture Claire is the performance of Callum Keith Rennie as one of Lily's accomplices. He plays the character with the flair of a theatrical killer and ends up exactly the way theatrical killers would in the real world.Other than that…ugh. Characters repeatedly have to do incredibly dumb things to get the story from one point to another. For all her carefully established traits, Claire is basically a non-entity played pretty much that way by Juliette Lewis. The script tries to compensate for that by giving the other characters more to do and say, but it never bothers to give the audience any reason to care about any of it. Director Bruce McDonald is also incessantly breaking up the screen into smaller boxes with different images in them. It's a mildly engaging visual technique that gets very old, very fast when it becomes clear that McDonald is only doing it because he thinks it looks cool.Picture Claire isn't an aggressively atrocious motion picture. It's just one of those lame indy flicks that aren't nearly as hip and cool as they think they are. If you've never seen those kind of movies, you might find this one just barely worth your time. However, there are a lot better films out there for you to watch.

This film is just plain not believable. Ms. Lewis who is one of my favorite actresses does not fit here. Her fake French is so annoying and looking for "Billy" really gets on my nerves. I would like for her at least to speak a better form of broken English to keep the plot moving. The direction is so slow and there are long periods of time with no dialogs like when Juliette is hanging from the balcony and dropping her boots to the ground.For me this is one of those films from Toronto that just does not fill the bill. A colorless City that always tries to pass for some were else. Plus how long was Mickey Rourke in the Film maybe about 10 minutes?

After all the bad press this film received, I was curious to watch it to see if the criticism was justified. It was. I am a Callum Keith Rennie fan and watched it mostly for him, but watching 80 minutes of eye-rolling tripe that made me yell at my TV screen was not worth it for the five minutes of (great) psychopath Rennie. Most of the fancy frame-in-frame-in-frame shots were annoying and did not add anything at all to the story. Claire was ridiculously stupid and there were plot holes in this thing you could drive a truck through. And the plot, such as it was, moved at a snail's pace. I kept wondering when something was finally going to HAPPEN already. Hated this film. A waste of celluloid.