What’s this? An egg salad sandwich from the Bloor Street Diner? Spirited debates about the merits of the new Jan Troell film? Long lines snaking around the Ryerson? I must be in Toronto.

The festival officially opened last night with the Canadian WWI epic Passchendaele, but for many, the festival’s real opening night is always the kickoff of the Midnight Madness sidebar. (That spot occasioned the most memorable premiere of 2006, a screening of Borat during which the projector broke and Michael Moore took the stage.) This year, the honor fell to Jean-Claude Van Damme, who plays a version of himself in the new meta comedy JCVD. But apparently, opening Midnight Madness isn’t a priority on the Bloodsport star’s schedule. The Muscles from Brussels was off directing a film in Thailand; he did have the good grace to send a video introduction, in which he apologized effusively for not being there and offered the audience a “big hug.”

Of course, part of the point of JCVD is that movie stars have feelings, too. Reeling from a custody battle, "Van Damme" wanders into the middle of a post office heist whose perpetrators—recognizing the potential in passing their crime off as the work as the work of an action icon—proceed to hold him hostage and order him to bark demands at the cops. (Van Damme, ever the realist, insists that their ransom request of one million euros isn’t plausible.) There’s some intelligent satire here about the way that people project their own desires onto celebrities; in a running gag, neither cops nor criminals can be in Van Damme’s presence without turning into starstruck idiots. Van Damme also delivers a confessional monologue that’s probably the closest he’ll ever come to doing Shakespeare. People are pegging JCVD as Van Damme’s career best, and not being a completist, I suppose I can’t really judge. But for all of Van Damme’s good sportsmanship about playing the part (and the film’s keen appreciation of his kickboxing skills), JCVD may be the kind of movie that’s funnier to joke about than to watch.
 
To rewind for a sec, the first day of Toronto always has the feel of a reunion. Critics assemble in the lobby of the Varsity, the main press screening venue, greeting each other like long-lost relatives. It’s a theater we know like home. When last night’s screening of The Brothers Bloom was delayed, allegedly because it was being projected digitally in both theaters 1 and 6, I was suspicious. (“It’s usually only digital in theater 8,” I told my seatmate, in a moment of profound unselfconsciousness. “Theater 1 is 35mm.”)

Also on yesterday’s docket: Fabrice du Welz’s thriller Vinyan, an attempt to cross Don’t Look Now with Apocalypse Now that, not surprisingly, winds up long on atmosphere and short on coherence. The film concerns a European couple (Emmanuelle Béart and Rufus Sewell) searching for their lost son in the jungles of Southeast Asia; it’s likely that he drowned in the 2004 tsunami, but Béart thinks she sees him on a video. Whether the film is making a serious statement on Western tourism in the third world is open to debate, but no movie that features a mud-covered Béart trudging through the jungle can be entirely without merits.
 
Festival highlight so far: A lovely sequence set to the Commodores’ “Nightshift” in Claire Denis’ 35 Rhums, a movie that provides only the most minimal of narrative cues. (As always in Denis’s films, body language says all that needs to be said.) Alex Descas plays a train operator, and in a sense, this family portrait—which shares certain affinities with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Cafe Lumière—is all about forward motion…

…as is the festival itself. I must hightail it to the Coens’ Burn After Reading.