This film suffers from a general lack of focus, being stitched together from four separate stories of varying degrees of incoherence, supposedly linked by a common thread. But the common thread turns out to be nothing more than a transparent plot device, and has nothing whatever to do with any of the stories except the fourth. None of the performances are particularly good, but to be fair to the actors, this may have had as much to do with the stilted dialogue that plagued much of the script (which itself may have been the product of a largely undeveloped concept). The net result is a film in which it seems that four scripts-in-progress have been mashed together, and at least two of the stories have the earmarks of having been jammed in largely unfinished: in Shoelaces, the interplay between the boy and girl and the events they encounter is more confusing to the audience than it is to the characters themselves and the story fails to come to any sort of conclusion or even leave the audience with a coherent question. In The Brazilian, the characters' motivations are murky when not equivocal--which seems not to have been deliberate on the part of the author(s) or film maker(s). The third segment of the picture is better, but choppy and without direction. The fourth story has the most going for it, featuring the best performances of the film in the characters of the disturbed homeless chess hustler, Henry, and (albeit a comparatively small role) that of the woman who turns out to be Henry's estranged wife and mother of their lost son. Ultimately, however, as art, the project confuses more than evokes, and therefore fails. Unfortunately, the principal entertainment value, for those who live or have lived in Toronto, lies in spotting familiar locales; for the rest of the audience, it can only be the same morbid fascination that keeps us from averting our eyes at the scene of a car wreck. Not recommended.
Review of Toronto Stories
