The Eighth Day Reviews

A depressing, deeply sentimental comedy from Jaco Van Dormael, director of the highly acclaimed TOTO LE HEROS. Harry (Daniel Auteuil) is an expert salesman with a marketing strategy where most people have a soul. His wife (Miou-Miou) has left him, taking their two daughters, and he spends most of his time giving sales seminars, teaching people how to adapt their personalities to those of prospective buyers, smoothing over differences in order to make that sale. But he's totally unprepared for the kind of differences he encounters in Georges, a boisterous runaway with Down's syndrome who, in the course of their travels together, teaches Harry how to laugh, love and hug trees. To say Van Dormael romanticizes his developmentally challenged hero while only touching on his pain and isolation is an understatement: Georges is more a latter-day mystic than a mere man, a divine creation graced with mad visions and the superhuman ability to commune with ants. Look at 1932's BOUDU SAVED FROM DROWNING and compare the unfettered, anarchic worlds of Georges and Boudu, social misfits who serve the same exact same function: upsetting the repressed bourgeois status quo and teaching pathetic "normals" what it means to really live. But by showing us what he imagines people like Georges are "good for," Van Dormael only answers the ugly question he himself poses in this naive and manipulative film.