PALM SPRINGS, CA — “Young man, I never thought I’d say this, but I’m in line for the Pope’s toilet!”
 
The speaker is a woman in her eighties who can’t be more than three feet tall, and she’s mistaken me for a volunteer at the 19th annual Palm Springs International Film Festival (which runs Jan. 3-14). The source of her confusion is the badge I’m wearing around my neck; I’m here as a member of the festival’s FIPRESCI jury, but since almost everybody under the age of 40 works for the festival, it’s an honest mistake.
 
As it turns out, we end up together at (as opposed to in) The Pope’s Toilet, a Uruguyan feature set during John Paul II’s 1988 visit to Latin America. The film is one of 53 I’m supposed to see: my fellow jurors — the well-known British (by way of South Africa) author and scholar Ronald Bergan and the French critic Isabelle Danel — and I have been asked to view every single title submitted this year for the Best Foreign-Language film Oscar (one per country). This isn’t as insane as it sounds — or at least that’s what I keep telling myself in between bouts of weeping — because we didn’t start from zero.

We’ve all caught about a dozen of the candidates over the past year, including Cannes heavyweights like the lacerating South Korean entry Secret Sunshine and the Palme D’or-winning Romanian drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (pictured), as well as Canada’s entry, Days of Darkness (screening next month at Cinematheque Ontario as part of Canada’s Top Ten). As for the rest, it’s been a steady diet of screenings and screeners (as many as five a day in preparation for our final deliberations on Friday). I can’t divulge which films have emerged as front-runners for our three prizes (best film, best actor and best actress), but at this point, I can say that I’m jonesing pretty hard for some entertainment that doesn’t involve reading subtitles (luckily, Tremors was on this morning at my hotel).
 
I can also discuss the films I’ve seen outside the competition. Palm Springs is a kind of victory-lap festival, culling together highlights from the past year and presenting them for the delectation of a generally aged — but impressively movie-savvy — constituency. I’ve directed several strangers to check out Spanish director Jose Luis Guerin’s sublime In the City of Sylvia, a rapturously beautiful film about the act of looking — specifically, about the gaze of a young artist who thinks he spies a former lover while sitting in a Strasbourg cafe. There’s almost no dialogue, and what little chatting there is feels incidental; Guerin’s visuals, meticulous yet seemingly effortless, are totally loquacious. There’s simply no distinction here between form and content — it’s utterly of a single piece, a totally unified work of art.
 
I’m not sure what the festival goers will think of Sylvia, but I know at least one gentleman who’s unhappy I recomended Serge Bozon’s La France; recognizing me in the theatre lobby yesterday, he scowled at me and shook his head. But it will take more than a dissatisfied duffer to make me feel chastened for talking up Bozon’s film, a WWI drama/sunshine pop musical (really) that finds the line between sincerity and preciousness and tiptoes elegantly across it for its duration. (It’s screening locally next month at Cinematheque, and I’ll have more to say about it then.) One film that the Cinematheque might look into showing at a later date is Italian director Saverio Costanzo’s In Memory of Myself, which follows up — and radically departs from — his excellent 2004 debut, Private. That film was a thinly veiled allegory for the conflict in the Middle East that confined its action to a small house; In Memory of Myself is also about tensions within a single habitation — a sprawling convent in Venice. A story of supplication that refuses to pass judgment on its spiritually seeking protagonist, it frustrates almost as much as it fascinates, but its difficulties don’t feel like obfuscations — the throughline between his films and the ones by Guerin and Bozon is a deeply felt sincerity.
 
One other film worth mentioning is Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories. While it’s not as accomplished as the titles mentioned above, it serves as a much-needed showcase for Michael Shannon, whose performances last year in Bug and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead — the former a twitchy tour-de-force, the latter a wry supporting turn in a film full of over-cooked hams — brought him to the forefront of American actors. Playing the eldest of three brothers feuding with half-blood relations — another set of sons begat by their late, miserable sonofabitch father — Shannon fairly exudes resentment and, more intriguingly, worry. Shotgun Stories isn’t plausible all the way through, and Nichols’ attempts to replicate producer David Gordon Green’s rural reveries are hardly novel (by now, it’s Terrance Malick twice removed), but there’s an intensity to the proceedings that can’t be denied.
 
The most intense experience of the week, though, has been eating lunch at the local hotspot known as Sherman’s. Recomended to me by my Toronto colleague Norm Wilner — who was on last year’s Palm Springs jury — it’s the sun-dappled Jewish delicatessen of your dreams (assuming you dream of such things). I’d been warned by various people not to try their signature sandwich, which crams a baseball’s worth of corned beef between two potato latkes, but I figured "what the hell" and took the plunge. I think, ultimately, that I’ll be OK, though it might be a few weeks before the true measure of the damage can be estimated.