LOOKING BACK My First and Last Time at the Movies
As cinemas are about to reopen again, I look back on two moments in my own moviegoing history.
The Federal Council announced, mere hours ago, that Swiss cinemas will be allowed to reopen on Monday, with a maximum of 50 seats per screening (100 for outdoor events). Whether some of them will reopen is a whole other matter (last October, the 50-seat limit caused the entire French-speaking region to close up shop wholesale before a general shutdown in the whole country was implemented a month later), but this is good news for movie lovers.
This got me thinking about my own relationship with moviegoing: by the time I set foot in a cinema again on Sunday (Visions du Réel is doing special in-person screenings for accredited press, professionals and jury members, including yours truly), it will have been 110 days since my last cinema visit – the longest gap in almost two decades (I started going to the cinema at least once a month in the second half of 2002).
My very first cinema visit – that I can remember, that is - was in late 1994 or early 1995 (I can’t say with absolute certainty, since I was five years old at the time), to see The Lion King. There are certainly worse choices for your very first moviegoing experience, a fact I was reminded of in 2011 when I attended the press screening for the 3D re-release: the opening sequence alone hits very differently when seen on the largest screen possible. It certainly left a mark on me, though not enough to instill a proper cinema passion at that point – I didn’t go again until Christmas 1996, for Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Anyhow, back to The Lion King: I went with a couple of friends, and the cinema was the Astra, in Como, Italy. Lest I’m mistaken (it’s been a while since I last visited the city properly), it’s the only old school movie theater left in the area, the lone remnant of many an afternoon or evening spent watching mainly arthouse films (as the more commercial fare migrated elsewhere) – if memory serves, the last movie I watched there, in February 2008, was Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd. I loved it, my friends not so much – especially since the trailers had failed to mention it was a musical, as opposed to a straightforward revenge thriller.
Fast forward to December 2020: I was in Finland for the Christmas holidays, as has been the case most years (although this time, due to the pandemic, my family’s options were limited, and the motherland was the obvious choice since our passports guaranteed us entry). While Swiss cinemas had been closed for a few weeks at that point (my last viewing had been a theatrical rewatch of Tenet, on November 27), Finnish ones were still open, and have remained so for the past few months – with the caveat that, due to seating limits (no more than 10 people per screening), there have been no major new releases since late October.
And so, faced with the very real possibility of physical screenings not happening in Switzerland for a while (back then, late January was optimistically suggested as a possibility), I took advantage of the BioRex in Porvoo, which is a much more modern building than the Astra – it’s only been around for ten years, nine of which at the current location (the last movie I saw at the old address, which they had inherited from the previous cinema, was The Avengers in late April 2012).
It’s been a huge part of my Finnish moviegoing, not least during the twelve months I spent interning at the National Audiovisual Institute. My favorite memory? Definitely when I went to see Piranha 3DD, and the staff were overjoyed because the movie had been out for three days and I was the first one to buy a ticket (everyone else was busy rewatching The Dark Knight Rises). They even offered free popcorn to show their gratitude (I declined). That movie lasted only one week in that cinema, and I’m fairly certain I’m the only one who actually watched it during that time.
Such was not the case with what is, at the time of writing, the last movie I saw in a cinema: Honest Thief, an action film starring Liam Neeson. The man is basically a genre unto himself at this point, and that movie was one of the better offerings (unlike, say, Bruce Willis, Neeson actually appears to genuinely care when he acts in these films). Nothing groundbreaking, but a solid piece of entertainment that kept me distracted from the world’s problems for two hours. Good enough to actually make me a tad emotional when one of my editors asked me to review it when it premiered in Italy (on TV), and I evoked the experience in the opening paragraph.
Hopefully, there won’t be a next time, whereby I once again will have to carefully choose my last cinema outing for the foreseeable future. Or if there is one, let’s hope it will last less than 110 days.