There are those who believe that any foreknowledge of a film is corrupting. For the best, truest experience, you should go in wholly innocent of reviews and word-of-mouth, aware of no more than the title and perhaps the poster design. And sometimes no doubt this method works beautifully. Sometimes, however – such as the first time I tried it – you are putting yourself in the hands of a cruel and irony-hungry god. Sometimes you end up seeing 101 Reykjavik with your mother.
101 Reykjavik, if you don't remember it, was a trendy social comedy made with the involvement of Damon Albarn at the moment when Iceland had just become established as a byword for kooky hipness. It concerns a young wanker (there seemed to be lots of masturbation gags), his mother and his mother's female lover, who seduces him in a quasi-incestuous manner, apparently for his otherwise wasted sperm. I saw it shortly after finishing A-levels. My mother was, oh, about the age of the mother in the film. I couldn't tell you whether it's any good outside that context.
Does every movie have a perfectly wrong audience? A few months back, the brilliant US radio series This American Life had an interview with a bloke whose babysitter had allowed him to stay up and watch The Shining when he was about the same age as – and looked quite a lot like – its child star. The nightmares lasted two years. Hearing his story gave me an enhanced respect for the work of the British Board of Film Classification – indeed, if they'd been doing those detailed warnings on their website back in the mid-1990s, I might never have seen 101 Reykjavik.
But not all sticky moments are of a kind from which the BBFC can be expected to save you. Somewhere this evening, I imagine, there is someone who has diagnosed Pixar as the ideal antidote for family tension, and has decided to take a bereaved elderly relative, terrified of being put in a home, to see Up. Someone is about to walk into a perfect storm of narrative coincidence. Maybe it's you.
Or maybe it happened to you last night. In which case, please share.
