Just about everything that’s wrong with the Ontario Film Review Board and bodies like it was made clear in a television appearance the other night by Robert Warren, chair of the board. He was being grilled about the board’s decision to ban the French film Fat Girl for its depiction of “teenage nudity and teenage sex in an explicit way.”

Someone raised the films Kids and American Beauty, both of which showed teenagers in sexual situations: In the first, a teenage boy coldly deflowered a series of young virgins; in the second, a middle-aged man fantasized about and later kissed a teenaged friend of his daughter.

How did those films pass review board standards when Fat Girl not? Yes, Warren said, Kids showed girls as young as thirteen having sex. And, yes, Kevin Spacey does become sexually obsessed with Mena Suvari in American Beauty.

The difference, according to Warren, is that the girls weren’t technically naked in those films, while the girls in Fat Girl are. In its harrowing exploration of sibling relations and female sexuality, Fat Girl shows teenaged nipples, which is why, apparently, it’s been banned.

And that’s exactly the kind of goofy, embarrassing, short-sighted decision that gets made when bureaucrats are put in charge of classifying and censoring art. Placed in the delicate position of protecting community standards, they make ham-fisted judgments with little or no public input on the essential questions of what community and whose standards should prevail.

It’s like the Canada Customs agents who have been empowered to seize books, magazines and videos being shipped into Canada if they are deemed obscene.

Agents have singled out shipments headed for gay and lesbian bookstores, such as Little Sisters in Vancouver, seizing and banning books that are not only innocuous, but widely available elsewhere. An Oscar Wilde play has been seized, along with a biography of Noel Coward and a collection of romantic letters between poets Byron and Shelley.

In 2000, after a fourteen year legal battle by Little Sisters and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Canada Customs officers could retain the power to seize material they believe is inappropriate, but that the onus is now on them to prove the material is obscene, which is still vaguely defined as something that violates community standards of tolerance.

Operating with a similar, nebulous community standard of obscenity, the Ontario Film Review Board is a twenty-seven member panel of private citizens who are appointed by the provincial government. Each works about four days a month screening films for a small stipend.

The board finances its activities by charging distributors to have their films classified and films must be screened and classified to be shown, rented or sold. Adult films, which must be approved before they are sold or rented in retail establishment, are a big money-maker for the board.

And that means board members are getting paid to watch huge amounts of porn, presumably without deleterious effect while telling the rest of the province what it can and can’t watch under the guise of “protecting the public.”

But back to Fat Girl. Warren has heard the arguments from filmmaker Atom Egoyan and Toronto International Film Festival director Piers Handling. He’s read the mostly positive reviews from Europe and the U.S. He’s even admitted that Fat Girl has artistic merit and isn’t exploitative.

The board was concerned, however, with the precedent that might be set by approving the film, worried that less scrupulous filmmakers might take advantage of the decision to have their films released. Which is a little like arresting an innocent person because someone else might commit a crime in the future.

At this point, the only chance anyone in Ontario has of seeing Fat Girl is to wait for the video. But even though the battle may have been lost on this film, the war against the review board isn’t over.

Glad Day, a lesbian and gay bookstore in Toronto, is currently up against the board in court, after the store’s owner John Scythes was charged under the Theatres Act of Ontario earlier this year for selling a gay porn video called Descent without approval of the board. Arguing freedom of expression, Scythes is hoping that his case will strip the board of its authority to ban films and videos.

“We are not attacking (the board’s) legitimacy as an advisory or educational board,” Scythes’ lawyer Frank Addario has told the press. “We are attacking its existence to censor.”

The Glad Day decision is expected in December or January.