I was alone in the theater for this movie: there were two of us… we stayed during the second commercials!

April 2010, Aix-en-Provence. As a man, I go to the cinema Le Cézanne to see a movie. which one I have no idea, I’m just going to see what’s going on and pass the time. Bad Luck: The schedule is bad and the choices are limited. All in all, I only have one movie left to return. It has a long title that means nothing to me. I haven’t seen any promotion around, I’m looking at a poster with Marina Hand and Julien Dore.

Fun movie and fun session

This movie is called together, we are going to live a very, very big love story. The rather long title of the romantic comedy adapted from Dino Rhys’s film Hurt Me But Cover Me With Kisses is a parody of photonovels that were published without much fanfare in France in 1973. I wasn’t like that at the time. I don’t know anything about it, I just say to myself “why not” and take my ticket.

I’m early, no session started, no ads. That means I still have a good 20 minutes ahead of me. So I wait in a room that seats at least a hundred, if not more, all alone. An ad starts and someone ends.

He is a fifty-year-old man, sixty. With salt-and-pepper curls in his shirt and blue jeans, he sits in the fourth row and watches commercials and trailers. “Okay, there’ll be two of us.”I told myself… no!

Because just before an envious sequence of trailers leads us to believe that the movie is about to start, the man gets up and calmly walks to the door he entered from! A burning desire? Not at all: he is gone, and I shall never see him again. The movie has started and I am alone in the room. I will stay till the end.

So I’m starting an appeal: if you were there that day in April 2010 in Cézanne, Aix-en-Provence, if you recognize yourself in this article, leave a comment: I want to know why you went. Because together, we could make a very, very big story… of cinema!