The Performer

The scouts

A three-minute film about a guy singing the national anthem before a hockey game sounds like the most aggressively conventional premise possible—and yet Bailey somehow makes the ritual feel genuinely strange, almost mythic, which is either brilliant subversion or the most boring thing I've ever been proved wrong about.

Bailey situates this moment in a precise lineage of Canadian documentary formalism—the National Film Board's visual restraint meets the ceremonial weight of institutional performance—and the tenderness she locates in Doucet's voice becomes an argument about how cinema can enshrine the quotidian as cultural text.

The decision to hold on Doucet's face during the anthem, letting the camera stay still while the crowd's presence registers only in sound, transforms what could have been a sports clip into something genuinely affecting—that single formal choice, sustained for three minutes, is everything.