I watched “Together” in a theater in Madrid. A Swedish production that traces the complicated relationships of a group of Stockholm hippies living in a mid-1970s commune, it’s a gentle, delightful movie that I would have enjoyed anywhere. But my pleasure was made all the more intense by the place in which I watched it.
To establish the time frame (to say nothing of the characters’ politics), “Together” opens with the members of the commune sitting around the television, watching the evening news. As the anchor soberly announces, “Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain, has died,” the characters break into a spontaneous, joyful chant: “Franco is dead! Franco is dead!” At that, the Spaniards around me in the theater likewise erupted. A deep, intense laughter rumbled through the aisles, a laughter that lasted much longer than the scene itself, and that could only have come from an audience with personal knowledge of what that particular death meant.
For some people I know, going to the movies while traveling is a cop-out. In these days of a globalized film industry, with Blockbusters renting videos in Dublin and Cineplex Odeon running theaters in Berlin, movies seem too familiar to count as travel; watching them is something we do at home. And with film festivals bringing the latest independent works from Pakistan and Kenya to Cleveland and Houston, there’s little chance that a movie showing in Denmark won’t eventually be available back in Denver.
But movies are useful for travelers. They perfectly fill, for example, that late afternoon/early evening dead zone in Europe, when the museums are closed and the restaurants have yet to open. All I remember of the utterly unscenic town of Brindisi, Italy, is a film I would have disdained to see back in the U.S., “Rambo.” To make matters worse, it was dubbed into a language I didn’t speak, but with many hours to go until the night ferry departed for Athens and nary a museum in sight, I was awfully grateful to have something to do.
Nor are the benefits all pragmatic. Movie-going in Europe can count as a cultural experience if you pay attention to the details. In Italy, they still screen films outside during the summer–not in the drive-ins of American memory, but, just as in that wonderful scene in “Cinema Paradiso,” in town squares.
In Paris, the feature itself is preceded with 30 minutes of commercials that are at least as artful as the films themselves. In Madrid, most frustratingly for someone with definite preferences on the subject (third row from the back, aisle), they assign seats. And in cities throughout Europe many theaters still employ ushers. (This is less charming than might be imagined; though the ushers don’t wear uniforms anymore, they still expect a tip.)
To be honest, though, difference is not always what I’m looking for when I walk into a movie theater. Although some of my friends scoff that it’s the equivalent of eating at McDonald’s while in Paris, I also go to English-language films–even Hollywood ones–when I’m in Europe.
In some parts of the continent, this quest for home requires avoiding the majority of a city’s movie theaters, since Europeans have a curious tendency to dub foreign films into their native languages. I realized this to my dismay only after having been drawn into a theater, on my first trip to Europe, by a 20-story, luridly handpainted billboard on Madrid’s Gran Via. There are few shocks greater for an American movie fan than watching Woody Allen open his famously downturned mouth to emit a voice that sounds for all the world like Julio Iglesias.
The trick, then, is to find the “v.o. theaters”–the ones that screen movies in version original, or in their original language. In them can be found not only English-language films as they were meant to be seen, but the rare, if illusory, pleasure of feeling like you belong. It’s a powerful draw. When I was last in Florence, there was only one v.o. theater, and it was always packed with Americans and Brits. It was a cramped, overheated place, but as the audience waited for the lights to go down, a palpable sense of giddy relief permeated the room, born, I’m convinced, of the momentary respite from being foreign.
During an extended trip that can be a valuable feeling indeed. I went to Paris for the first time just out of college, with no greater plan–I had no job and spoke no French–than to live there. Eventually I found a job (actually a series of them, beginning with selling perfume and ending with waiting tables in a “Chicago-style” steakhouse) and a good language class, but v.o. cinemas continued to be my refuge. The French are good about subtitling; they understand that the sound of an actor’s voice contributes to the film’s meaning, and plus, they like to read. So there were lots of v.o. theaters from which to choose, and I can count watching Audrey Hepburn prance through the same Parisian streets I had walked along earlier in the day as one of my great movie-going experiences.
But another film from that time stands out even more sharply. It was a Monty Python movie–“Life of Brian,” I think–and subtitled for the audience. Subtitles are blunt instruments, and in a film like “Life of Brian,” they can hardly begin to capture all the nuances and comic asides. I remember laughing uproariously–and alone–while everyone around me busily read the lines on screen. Yet instead of being embarrassed by my outburst, I felt vindicated. Months of frustration and shame at my inability to express anything more complicated than a dinner order melted away as I alone “got” what was going on.
Of course, that moment of triumph lasted only as long as the projector was running. Stepping back out onto the street after seeing an English-language movie in Europe always brings with it a slight shock as my senses adjust not only to the light outside, but to the often unintelligible chatter around me, to the urban smells that are nothing like the smells of the megaplex parking lot back home. It’s a lonely feeling: to remember that the two hours just spent–two hours in which I understood every word spoken, every gesture made, every cultural reference invoked–were illusory, and that in fact, I am in a place that is not my home.
But movies have always trafficked in illusion; traveling just complicates the issue a little. Watching that Swedish film in a Spanish movie theater, I felt like I “got” why the Madrilenos around me were laughing so hard; I felt, illusorily, like I belonged. It was the foreign counterpart to the pleasure I feel at home watching films set in places I have visited: the feeling of belonging elsewhere.
