Dear all,
here's the second part of my own BBM story:
I’d say the Loews 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...
I left, continuing my journey through NYC, and not thinking much - or perhaps trying not to think much - about BBM. The following day I arrived in Chicago and at a point, while walking in the city centre, the whole story began to resurface in my mind in all its powerful beauty and tragedy. In a few minutes I was swept away, unable to think to anything else but to this classic and tragical story of impossible love. Why? This was the first time I was experiencing the phenomenon I now call the BBM long-distance effect. It never hits me immediately after the viewing: on the contrary, after having seen it I feel somehow relieved, but after a few hours, or on the following day, and often for a number of days afterwards, I feel wrecked, as if the soul of the story has somehow subsided into my brain and worked out a slow chain reaction on my neurons...
Well, useless to say, the following days were a series of emotional ups and downs, with thoughts on the story continuously resurfacing along the day. I had never imagined a movie could harm me lke this. All too soon I was back to old Europe, glad for both the vacation and for having had the privilege of having been one of the first viewers of what I had now elected as my all times favourite movie.
But BBM fever, that Leslie Nicolls has so well depicted in one of her great posts, had hit me so deeply that I was now feeling the need to know more about the movie, the author, the actors and so on. Above all, I was beginning to feel the sensation that I had actually known both Ennis and Jack, as if they were two real friends of mine. I bought the Italian translation of the short story, in order to better understand a number of passages that still were not completely clear to me, and became an aficionado visitor as well as a poster at IMDB. Please note that I had never, never been posting anything on the internet in my previous 45 years of existence.
Christmas was now approaching, and BBM was now being released throughout the U.S.A. and England, but for the Italian public it was still a long way to come, its release date having been announced as January 18, 2006. And how long would it have been before it could reach the town where I live? Could I wait such a long time without seeing BBM again?
- end of part two, soon to be continued -
