We settled into our seats at a Melbourne International Film Festival screening of Coda, a documentary on the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto: front row, two out from the side wall, with the screen looming to our right.
Anyone with a decent seat must have spent a good 45 minutes queueing to get in, and to be honest we felt lucky to have actual seats at all – people who came later were sat on plastic chairs on the carpet.
What kind of person wears a baseball cap in the cinema?
A plaster statue of Julius Caesar gazed out from a niche beside the screen, which soon filled with images of the devastation in northern Japan after the 2011 tsunami, Sakamoto playing a grand piano that had somehow survived the inundation, and crowds of protesters in Tokyo megaphoning against nuclear power.
I leaned across to my partner to make some remark or other, a quiet whisper in her ear.
“No commentary please!” I heard from a voice to my right.
He was a large man, and I judged him to be the type who is only seen in public when “public” means a darkened cinema: a classic MIFF nerd.
Replay
I had barely said a word. I sat there like George and Jerry in an episode of Seinfeld: the nerve of this guy, shushing me!
I know it’s annoying when couples whisper during movies, and I know it would be impossible if everyone did it. But we were only a few minutes in, and I believe there is a grace period at the start of a movie when it’s perfectly OK to talk.
I sat there for the rest of the movie imagining the Seinfeld episode in which I told the shusher exactly what I thought about being shushed, and we ended up wrestling on the carpet and getting thrown out. The shusher and I were both somewhat miffed.
We were doing a MIFF double, so after Sakamoto we joined a another epic queue: this one spilling out of the Comedy Theatre, around the corner and up Little Bourke Street.
We found seats upstairs on the balcony, second row from the back, equally uncomfortable vintage leather cushions stuffed with horsehair.
The movie was a Japanese drama about a family that wasn’t really a family. In the seat right in front sat a guy wearing a baseball cap with the bill tilted up; beside him his tall girlfriend had her hair fixed in a topknot. Every time a character spoke and a subtitle flashed on the screen I had to crane around the guy’s hat to see what was going on.
No baseball caps please! I thought, and almost said. And do something about your girlfriend’s hair!
I was tempted to reach over and flip the cap right off. What kind of person wears a baseball cap in the cinema? I pictured us wrestling in the aisle over the cap, etc, etc.
By the end of the night I had a sore neck and I was, it’s fair to say, more than a little bit miffed.
Matt Holden is an Age columnist.
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