See a film with critics in London and, scratchy biros aside, you’d barely know they were there. Even if the movie is ever so funny or sad, a collective vow of silence is taken: half cultural, half professional. The only loophole comes when it’s very bad. Then, extravagant sighs are de rigueur.
To some extent, such behaviour is replicated in cinemas nationally. Brits aren’t whoopers; neither are we groaners. If a film is simply mediocre, we’ll grit our teeth and stick it out.
Watch one in north America, and it’s different. At the two film festivals I’ve been to, Telluride in Colorado and Toronto – both of which have screenings attended by a mix of public and press – it is, in general, incredibly noisy. The audience clap and cheer, gasp and giggle. When amused, they give it some welly. They trash freely, praise liberally.
This was best demonstrated for me at a screening of Steve Jobs, the new Danny Boyle biopic starring Michael Fassbender and scripted by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The Social Network and The West Wing, and is current crowned king of walk-and-talk wisecrack dialogue. In the film there is an enormous amount of quick and vicious quipping, including an extended showdown between Jobs and many others. As it reached its thundering climax, one man in the back row appreciatively yelled out: “Sorkin!” It was a lovely moment: so perfect a bro-backslap that the Guardian film team have adopted it as a snappy alternative to “Well done”.
So, all well and good. Such interaction is a bracing continuation of Renaissance-era tradition. Except that, outside the cinemas, it’s flipped. Attempt to tell a joke in the UK and people will, if tickled, giggle. Do so in the US and, nine times out of 10, they just say: “Oh, that’s hilarious.” Or, in exceptional cases: “Oh, that’s hysterical.” Such a response, especially in lieu of laughter, is really unnerving. In a room of many, people are, it seems, happy to express themselves. One on one, they just offer commentary.
The sum of fandom
In Toronto the atmosphere doesn’t run on hyperventilation as it does in, say, Cannes. But star-worship still rules supreme. Rubbernecking crowds clog hotel entrances, and the sound of screaming frequently fills the air. A friend was felled by a man racing down the street on a quest to get a selfie with Jane Fonda.
Telluride doesn’t have that. That’s because it’s hard to get to, (in Colorado, up a mountain, then along a bit) and passes aren’t cheap. But once you’re there, it is egalitarian. Punters and A-listers chat in the hot dog queue or in the line for a movie, and anarchy does not result. People do not, it turns out, overdose on fandom. They just carry on as if the celebrities were almost normal people. And what that means is that you suddenly see a big star on a street corner looking oddly lonely.
Who needs the weed?
The number one thing to do in Telluride, according to TripAdvisor, is not the festival or the skiing, or the gold mine hikes or the legal marijuana shop. It’s the gondola: an enclosed ski-lift that takes 12 minutes to ferry you from town to the settlement at the mountain top. It is, signs tell you proudly, the only free public transportation system in the world. And it’s completely fantastic – terrifying at first but quickly addictive. By day, it affords extraordinary views across the great craggy terrain and down on to the manicured, Truman Show-style streets and golf courses and condos. By night it’s pitch black inside and out, which is hugely spooky and exciting. The films themselves this year sometimes underwhelmed. But art understandably struggles to compete, when real life is so spectacular.
