Good movies are meant to be seen on the big screen

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. I was running late and the film had started. I entered the hall and unable to locate my friends in the dark, sat down in the first seat I could find.

I tried to message them but the woman behind me hissed, “Please turn off your phone. The glare is affecting my eyes." I could see her point. Chastened, I put the phone away.

The film was Shyam Benegal’s Manthan (1976). The restored print was gorgeous but it was a version without subtitles. The man next to me and his companion were both French-speaking.

Stranded in rural India without subtitles, they started murmuring to each other in French. Right on cue someone’s phone started ringing in the row behind me. The woman rummaged in her capacious handbag and finally managed to extricate the phone.

It glowed as bright as a casino in Las Vegas while it sang its merry tune at top volume. Everyone started clucking and hissing. The flustered woman told the people around her, “I am trying to mute it.

But I don’t really know how. Here, why don’t you try?" I realised it had been a long time since I had been in an old-fashioned movie theatre. I’d forgotten its little dramas, the rules of etiquette and how things that would not bother me while watching something on TV infuriate me inside a movie theatre.

But most of all, I had forgotten how good movies can look on a big screen, the way they were meant to be seen. Until the covid lockdown I regularly went to see films in theatres. Covid changed our viewing habits.

We discovered binge watching on OTT. After covid faded we resumed much of what we had been used to. We went out to bars and restaurants and went on vacations again.