Thousands of women regularly haul themselves off to small book club meetings; some, like the ones in Film Society, opt for video-watching gatherings. This is a sort of cultural phenomenon. It’s also a resource: so much condensed information about different lives within a themed group, and such a natural market in those thousands of women looking now and again to study their own reflections at their book or film clubs.

Nothing so cynical lies behind Film Society, although the thought may lurk in a marketer’s mind. Instead, this story of seven women in the village of Stirling in Eastern Ontario, who get together each month to watch films such as Babette’s Feast and ’Night, Mother, is marked by a yearning, even a hormonal ditziness, that makes anything as linear as conscious cynicism unthinkable.

The theme Film Society most adamantly pursues is the possibility of salvation in the form of love. The trouble is, even though these are women in their thirties and forties, their notions of love are stuck at the level of unrequited adolescent crush. Alex, the vegetable-growing wife of an artist, has one for the guy who sells sunflowers from the next market stall; hopeful writer Grace for the ob/gyn who delivered her children; Delaney, wife, mother, Sears employee, and documentary filmmaker, for a Montreal filmmaker; and Sally the florist for a man she’s met only by phone. Then there’s the narrator, Sadie, a 49-year-old literacy centre director, mother, and ex-wife who’s had a series of brief and unlikely attractions she refers to, quite unironically, as love.

Film Society is Belleville, Ontario, resident Gilaine Mitchell’s first novel. The former scriptwriter, producer, and director of corporate and educational videos is at her best when the women are actually doing something, particularly when Delaney is making her documentary about daughters and their dead mothers.

These are moments of real passion. Far more numerous, however, are the moments when the women are obsessively
(and, more to the point, one-sidedly) translating a few happy or fantasized rolls in the hay into something large and true enough to save them.