You Can’t Go Home to Art Films Again

Why did we stop going to art cinemas? Was it one “Dolce Vita” too many? Did I OD on ennui?

These were the questions in my mind as we ventured back for a special showing of an early Kurosawa movie called “One Wonderful Sunday.”

My husband and I had once conducted a cross-continental courtship through the great foreign films of the ‘50s and ‘60s. We made out during Alec Guinness at the Evanston, broke up in the middle of Fellini at the New Yorker and got engaged over Godard at the Telegraph Avenue Cinema-Guild. The night of our senior prom we went to see Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring,” which made us the talk of our high school. We honeymooned at a Von Stroheim retrospective.

What was the lure of the art cinema? Was it the smell of fresh-roasted coffee, the unreadable subtitles or the people standing in line in front of you, loudly opining, “Basically, Hitler was bad. . . .”

The great New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael got her start writing the program notes for the Cinema-Guild in Berkeley. For me, those program notes were always the lure. I mean, who could resist stuff like, “In this film essay, Letoro balances the meaninglessness of modern life against the pointlessness of history. By keeping the screen black for the full 85 minutes, he creates a wry statement about a life caught between the social and the personal. . . .”

OK, so the art cinema had a pretentious streak. Maybe that’s why I spent my 20s there. But just because I swore off Kierkegaard and gave up Gauloises, does that mean that I’m condemned to a life of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman?

As soon as I entered the theater to see the Kurosawa movie, I remembered that the pompous nature of the audience is always balanced by the funky ambiance of the house. The broken-down lobby, the unintentional rocking-chair seats and the nonchalant, Dostoevski-reading ticket-taker were still intact.

I went to buy my popcorn and discovered that I was in a Cholesterol Free Zone. “We don’t use butter,” the half orange-haired, half skin-headed lady with the large earrings said. Then she pointed to two shakers on the counter, “But we do have salt and yeast.”

“Yeast?” I said, laughing. “Yeast? Did you just have a Woody Allen film festival?”

“No,” said the unsmiling work-of-art-herself lady. “Our customers asked for it.”

My husband and I assumed the position--legs sprawled out toward the aisles to avoid the tacky, never-cleaned floors. And thus began 108 excruciatingly slow 35-millimeter minutes.

We went through a day in the life of two young lovers in postwar Tokyo. We suffered through their grief. We shared the tension as the woman struggled to avoid sexual contact with her lover. Even removing the raincoat she wears throughout the entire movie would have violated the movie’s 1947 morality. The dramatic highlight occurs when she undoes one button on the raincoat and then breaks down weeping.

In the surprise finish--which I bet you’ll never see--the girl turns to the audience and says the equivalent of, “If you believe in love, clap.” I and the other five women in the audience wept and clapped. Awww.

Then it was over. One hundred and eight minutes of waiting for something to happen. In the end, we--the audience--made it happen. Hey . . . arty.

“Now, what was it that made you think we’d like this movie?” my husband asked in that I’d-rather-be-watching-”thirtysomething” voice.

I read him from the program notes: “This may be Kurosawa’s most daring film--and most endearing, with its Capraesque whimsicality and optimism in the face of grim reality.”

Just our luck. We must have seen the version without the optimism and Capraesque whimsicality.