That Day

There’s always one at every film festival. A movie so bad and so incoherent that it’s impossible to imagine what the programmer was thinking when he/she picked it. That Day certainly falls under that category, a film that defies description (and not in a good way, either). The movie is set in Switzerland at some undetermined point in the future, where Livia (Elsa Zylberstein) teams up with an escaped psychopath (played by Bernard Giraudeau) and begins offing her family (for no reason whatsoever, although there is a hint that maybe they’re after her money). The fact that the film is set in the future seems to be an excuse for all the inexplicable developments in the story (eg Livia doesn’t seem concerned that a nutcase is killing everyone around her). The only way any of this even begins to make sense is if we’re to infer that the world has been overrun by crazy people, but that’s not even alluded to. There isn’t a hint of expository dialogue in the film; it’s all nonsensical conversations about tarot cards and naming horses. It becomes evident almost immediately that That Day is less a movie and more an endurance test, as though the filmmakers are daring audience members to sit through the whole thing. Writer/director Raoul Ruiz has helmed almost 100 movies in his long career, leaving one to conclude that, somewhere along the way, he lost his mind and came up with this. That he managed to convince a lot of very good actors (including legendary French performer Michel Piccoli) to appear in this chaotic mess is incredible, and will likely convince a lot of folks that the movie is worth checking out. It’s not.

no stars out of ****