Oh, for a bit of Disney

There are films that make you want to sing. Others make you want to dance. Still others … well, you get the point. The two films that we saw today, at our first day at the 22nd Vancouver Film Festival , exist at the other end of the emotional spectrum. Maybe not a wash-down-a-bottle-of-Valium-with-a-fifth-of-12-year-old-Scotch kind of bad, but close.

The first was a Japanese film titled “The Vibrator,” which could be best described as what happens when, instead of buying a bottle of wine, a woman (who, we gradually discover, hears voices and suffers from bulimia) jumps into the cab of a trucker whom she has just met and drives with him around the country, alternately making love and puking. Yeah. Then, about 90 minutes later, we sat through “Crimson Gold,” the new film by the Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. It begins with a robbery gone wrong and the robber blowing his brains out, then spends the next hour and a half showing how this poor loser got himself in such a bad situation.

So, OK, both films have much to recommend them. Especially the Japanese one. It’s done in modified Dogma style (hand-held camera, natural lighting, no violence but with a musical score made up of pop songs), and it is a fascinating study first of dysfunction and then psychological healing. And the Panahi? Well, it’s another stark exploration of how the individual tends to get lost in a religious police state such as Iran.

Understand? Good. You’ll have to excuse me now. While my wife found both films, she says, “uplifting,” I need to go find my antidepressants.