I know, it's a bit too early, but as I will be travelling next week and unable to connect, I thought it was necessary to remember on these pages that in 8 days it will be one year since BBM hit the screens and the large publlic.
I already wrote my whole - so far - BBM story in the "My passion for BBM thread", but please let me re-tell - at least for those who didn't have a chance to look at it, part of the instalments which refer to my first viewing:
Well, I just happend to be planning a short vacation in NYC and ChiTown at the beginning of December, and by chance BBM was going to be officially released in the Big Apple on Dec. 9.
Great, then: my vacation would have been highlighted by the vision of BBM, right on its first day of going public. That morning it was snowing a lot in NYC, and I remember walking Broadway from the Penn Station all the way up until reaching the Loews Theatre at Lincoln Square. I was there at around 10.15am and yes, BBM was there. All the tickets for the evening viewings had already been sold, but there were still places available for the 11.15am viewing, the first “commercial release”. Even better! I could be among the privileged earlybirds to see it...[I’d say the theatre was almost 70% full, with a good mix of viewers. As soon as the movie began, it was as if I was seeing scenes I had already seen before, only enriched by the magnificence of the landscape, the masterful directing and the beauty of the actors – and I refer not only to the two main characters, but to their wives, children and most other players in the movie as well: I found almost everybody playing in BBM either beautiful or handsome -. Truly, almost every scene on screen had been meticolously recreated according to what Annie Proulx had imagined, and all the added items fit so perfectly that I couldn’t have imagined anything different.
I greatly enjoyed the public reactions along the development of the story: there were laughs at funny events - especially at the scene when Aguirre spots the two guys “fighting” after the second tent scene -, and you could feel the sorrow when things began to go the sad way. After all the titles and both “The Wings”, “He was a friend of mine” and “The Maker makes” had finished, people slowly began leaving the theatre, and you could feel how anybody there had been touched by the movie. You didn’t see tears around, but you felt people had been deeply hit.
I left as well, with a strange sensation in me: I had liked it greatly, though I missed a part of the dialogues - not being a native speaker - but overall I was feeling a strange form of confusion. Was I expecting to be moved as much as to cry? Maybe, but it hadn’t happened. Was what I had seen a faithful reproduction of my own experience? Not really, though there were similarities, as along my life there had been periods when I had been feeling an exceptionally strong attraction - mostly intellectual, but I don’t deny it had been physical too - for a very good friend of mine, in circumstances not too different from those described in BBM. But life makes you review your thoughts, reposition your priorities, decide what can be right or wrong - maybe? -, and that had been a number of years before. So what? In the last few years I had been quietly living my single existence filling it with lots of different interests, so why should I care too much about an old story.
Overall, was I happy with my life in general? Yes, no doubt. Well, ehm, maybe...
And now, I am just wondering. Was there anyone else currently reading these lines at the Loews Theatre in NYC that morning besides me? I clearly remember BBM was shown in the Olympia Up room, and I was sitting in a middle row to the left of the screen. To my right, by the aisle, a lady in her late 50s, drinking a Coke and crunching on some popcorns (but only before BBM began, of course), to my left a male couple. I'm sorry I didn't try to discuss the movie with anybody around me.
Maybe some would-be Brokies were already there... and I'd be happy to know that someone among you were!
Luigi
