A heavy, violent Polish film, with English subtitles, at nine a.m.: everybody should try it—once! The only films I’ve ever seen in the morning were those old fifties melodramas they showed us in high school to warn us about intimate physical contact or drugs, which were sometimes so terrifying they’d keep us awake at night. The violence in this Polish offering was a different kind, more psychological than physical, but it was still nine a.m. and I had a lot of trouble concentrating on the misfortunes of the woman who was being humiliated by her husband, even though the film was excellent. I felt a vague discomfort the way you do when you change your schedule at the last minute and find yourself somewhere at an unaccustomed time: the lighting in the room is the same but the light is different, because the sun isn’t in the same place. You feel displaced, but required to go on functioning as usual, in a waking dream.

After the second film—from England this one, fascinating and admirably filmed but which I was already beginning to confuse with the preceding one—I was hungry. Obviously a quiet lunch at a good little restaurant was out of the question; it was over a Mister Steer, number six, that Mathieu and I discussed what we’d just seen . . .

My buttocks started to ache during the first film of the afternoon, a deadly bore about peasant life in rural Japan, almost impossible to sit through till the end. While I was watching it I thought that if a Québécois filmmaker dared to make a movie like that he’d be massacred and his film wouldn’t have a chance of being shown outside the country; he’d be called a “misérabiliste”, accused of fascination with the sordid side of life (the sordid aspects of Japanese life being automatically universal, I suppose, but not ours), worst of all a regionalist: we must keep our peasants to ­ourselves, they’re shameful, but by all means let’s share other people’s, they’re culture. But then I told myself I was being unfair: no great film about peasant life has ever been made here, I think. But would we manage to impose it on the Japanese if it existed, or must we always suffer the ­folklore of others?

The last screening of the day did me in: I haven’t seen many of those Australian films people have been raving about in recent years and if this one was typical I was very glad I’ve been staying at home watching soaps; they don’t cost anything and at least I can laugh.