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Day 5 is not only the mid-point of the festival, it's almost my first day to slow down and relax. I don't have to be up until 10:30am. And though I don't sleep that late, there's something nice about just lying in bed.

The first movie is a documentary by Raymond Depardon on the French judicial system. It's gotten great reviews, but I wasn't terribly impressed. It's amusing and insightful for a while, but the second half doesn't add much to the first half. It feels like we're watching a French version of Judge Judy. The judge, who is a woman, is entertaining at first, but her rolling eyes and lectures seem like bad habits after a while. And I wasn't completely convinced that a couple of her decisions at the end were correct. Of course, we're getting edited views, but that raises the larger problem. What's the point of the film? We don't have enough information to really evaluate the court's fairness or its procedures, and the lack of any outside commentary or explanation reduces us to accepting what we see. Documentaries should reveal things I don't know, show me things I haven't seen, take me places I've never been. 10e Chambre doesn't quite succeed at any of those.  

Rob Davis and I left that screening and headed off to find some lunch. But in one of those serendipitous moments I love about Toronto, we bumped into Doug Cummings and his friend David. We soon met up with Darren and Candace and all went out for a lovely lunch of Indian food. The conversation was delightful, as we talked about movies (of course) but also whether it's easier to write comedy or tragedy, the nature of adapting books for film, and what it's like to live in a tourist town.

I had some time after lunch to come back to the hotel and lie down. Even though I didn't fall asleep, it was wonderfully refreshing. Then it was off to my second film of the day, Michael Winterbottom's 9 Songs. It came into the fest with some notoriety for its explicit sex scenes, and they are explicit (and prevalent). The movie simply focuses on a couple, a British man and an American woman, who meet at a concert and then spend much of the movie going to other concerts and having sex (not at the same time). The concert footage, nine songs worth, is fantastic. Winterbottom shoots with a hand-held camera in the midst of the crowd, so it feels like you're a part of the concert, though with an especially good seat. He taps into the tremendous energy of the music, light show, and audience, imparting that communal feel when you get when you're part of a 5,000-person audience all dancing and clapping in time to the music.

He then cuts to the sex, which is just one man and one woman, but because the sex is real (erections, genitalia, penetration, orgasms), its energy matches the energy of the music. Its intense connection between two people mirrors the connection we experience during the concert footage. There's also a great tenderness to many of the sex scenes; one in a bathtub echoes something out of the French New Wave (thanks to Darren Hughes for that astute observation).

I wish the film were longer, though. I wanted to know more about these characters, to get a better sense of what moves them and why they came together and why, in the end, they drift apart. There are also a few scenes in Antarctica that are forced. Winterbottom wants to say something about isolation, but the metaphor isn't as powerful as the metaphor of the concert. Still, this is one of those provocative films that actually provoked me to think and not just to flinch. And its realistic sex scenes are explicit but not gratuitous. There are more than a few filmmakers who could learn from Winterbottom's example.

I took a chance with my final film of the day, but it didn't work out. Buffalo Boy, a movie from Vietnam set in the days of French colonialism, is a coming-of-age tale. During the flooding season, a 15-year-old boy has to set out with the family's two water buffaloes for higher ground. Along the way, he has life experiences and life lessons. The cinematography is gorgeous, but the story is cliched. It doesn't help that it wants to introduce so many narrative strands that there's no way it can keep up with all of them. Nonetheless, the large contingent of Vietnamese in the audience seemed genuinely moved. I was reminded of that great moment in Walker Percy's The Moviegoer where he describes how much we enjoy seeing our own situation, our own locale in a movie. It validates our own experiences, it reminds us that we are not alone, that there are other people who have gone through the same problems and the same triumphs. So in that way, Buffalo Boy was a success. Just not for me. 

We're past the half-way point now, but tomorrow brings the longest day of the festival.

J Robert
 
 

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