Infine

In my second year at University I lived in a road with a name that conjured up dirty railway bridges and industrial revolutions. Viaduct Road was not the most glamorous street in sunny Brighton and indeed, at that time it was also known as the A27 - one of the main routes through the town before they built the shiny new by-pass. What it did have though, sitting quite regally at the bottom of the rows of terraced houses, was a fine old cinema.

The Duke of York's was, and still is, a great art-house cinema where you can find the uncommercial gems, old classics or subtitled beauties. It only had one screen, squidgy old seats that got seriously uncomfortable if you ever went to see a double-bill and a proper cafe that sold cakes and cups of tea - not a popped piece of corn in sight!

In 1989, one of the most talked about films, and winner of an Oscar for best foreign language film was Cinema Paradiso. This, naturally, was the kind of film that the Duke of York's was open for! The hopeless romantic in me called me down the road and one enchanted evening, housemate Rosie and I bought our tickets and settled ourselves in the red velvet plush.

Imagine our disappointment however when the film started... those subtitles surely weren't Italian, they looked trés français. Gerard Depardieu was not supposed to be in a small town cinema in Sicilly. Zut alors! We were in the wrong film. That's the trouble with only having one screen - it tends to suggest that you just request "two tickets" rather than adding a qualifying "for..." Well, the Cinema Paradiso run had ended the previous evening. Trop belle pour toi was a pleasant enough way to pass an evening I suppose but it wasn't Italy.

Fast forward life's projector 20 years (surely, some mistake here... was 1989 really TWENTY YEARS AGO??). Tonight I finally watched it. Beautiful, romantic, nostalgic, gentle... worth the wait.

PS: the music from the film is really beautiful - love theme by Ennio Morricone