Skål!
If you have read my review of Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round, then you know that I have finally made my first foray into a cinema during the Covid era. (The original Danish title, by the way, is Druk, which means boozing or binge drinking.)
This came a mere 504 days after my last visit, which was to Dublin’s wonderful underground classy multiplex, the Light House Cinema in Smithfield. We saw the Argentine film Iniciales S.G., directed by Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia, and the occasion was the quickest of visits to the ongoing Dublin International Film Festival.
We were actually in Dublin back then for a different, week-long event entirely, and we now look back on it as the last gasp of the pre-Covid era. We not only went to a cinema, but we went to cultural sites like the National Art Gallery on Merrion Square and the Museum of Literature Ireland on St. Stephen’s Green. We attended presentations in crowded rooms on the campus of Trinity College. We even squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder with other (much younger) patrons at tiny tables in a trendy taco restaurant, just off sometimes-wild South William Street.
Soon after, all that was but a memory. We found ourselves at home practically all the time, and an occasional trip to the nearest supermarket became a major event.
What was it like to go back to a movie theater after a year and a half? You probably know better than I do. Ireland has been particularly cautious, even among European countries, in restricting its inhabitants’ movements. Cinemas opened at least once before this, as well as other establishments, but it always turned out to be short-lived. Particularly frustrating for the Irish has been the fact that, to this day, “wet” pubs (i.e. pubs that don’t serve food) have never re-opened. As of this writing, they are tentatively scheduled to re-open next week, but we’re still waiting for the final word on that. My impression is that people in many other countries have long since gotten back to “normal.”
So, what was it like for me the other day? Strangely, normal. Galway was still its old self, except for the fact that it was bright, warm and sunny. For the past few days the country has been experiencing a “heat wave.” Ireland is one of the few places I know where meteorologists refer with straight faces to temperatures around 30 C (mid-80s F) in July as “unseasonable.”
The film was at the wonderful Pálás, which as it turns out, nearly seems to have been designed for the Covid era. Everything is organized to avoid human contact. One is strongly encouraged to purchase tickets online, print them out at home and go directly to your screen where the ticket is scanned by an automatic bar-code reader. I would have spoken to no one had I not gone out of my way to verify I was doing the right thing with the masked young lady behind the plastic screen at the box office.
All seats at the Pálás have always been pre-assigned, and now you are guaranteed that you will sit near no one who is not in your party. (The curmudgeon in me kind of likes that.) As it happens, there were only two of us present for the screening, and the other bloke was about as far away from me as was possible. The voice in the dark told us that, once seated, we could remove our masks, which was a relief because it can be challenging for me to read subtitles without my glasses and my glasses fog up when I wear a mask.
Speaking of subtitles, this screening happened to have subtitles for the hearing impaired, so not only did they inform me what the Danish and Swedish actors were saying but also when they were laughing or sniffling or when music was on the soundtrack and, in the case of classical snippets, which snippets they were (e.g. Schubert’s “Fantasia in F Minor Op. 103, D. 940”). (More contemporaneous melodies were described generically, e.g. “Hot Funk Music.”) While this could be distracting, it did provide information that I would otherwise have missed entirely.
In particular, the subtitles alerted me to the fact that the wife of Martin (Mads Mikkelsen’s character), Anika (played by Maria Bonnevie), delivered all her lines in Swedish, while her husband and children spoke to her in Danish. I would have never known they weren’t all speaking Danish. Apparently, Scandinavians of different countries can often understand each other if they speak slowly and clearly—though I hear that the Danish numerical system totally baffles Norwegians. Most of my knowledge in this area comes from my Danish friend (with a Swedish name) Claes. At his request, I have now carefully read several of his own translations of his Danish fiction and non-fiction books to help him polish the English-language versions—though Claes suspects I am mainly just trying to make them sound more North American. As a result (along with many conversations with and explanations from Claes), I actually have a strange sense of knowing Denmark, though I have never set foot there in my life.
Interestingly, Claes, who has lived for many years in England and Ireland, tells me he often has trouble understanding actors in Danish movies. He blames it on the “Mads Mikkelsen effect” and says that many in Denmark refer to the actor as “Mads Mumlesen” (“Mads Mumbleson”). “His whole career,” says Claes, “started with him being hired for a role only because he spoke the way real Danish people do these days, i.e. incomprehensibly.” Not to put too fine a point on it, Claes says he actually understands the actor better in English than in Danish.
Before the main feature, we saw a trailer for Mikkelsen’s new movie, Riders of Justice, and I wonder how easy it will be for Claes to understand him in that one. It’s a violent revenge action flick with the often-suave Carlsberg spokesman looking quite rough with a beard and shaved head and uttering the kind of dark threats that might make Liam Neeson nervous.
My date for the movie totally missed the fact that Anika was Swedish. That was because she only got the standard subtitles. How did that happen? She was at a different cinema in a different city. My kid and I went on one of those long-distance virtual dates like Bill Gates used to go on during his early working days (and is maybe doing again now).
Talk about social distancing.
-S.L., 23 July 2021
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