The Cocteau's demise takes Santa Fe another step away from bohemia.
One might have expected at least a smidgen of fanfare: some ironic black crèpe, perhaps a speech, a few sentimental cineastes coming to pay sad tribute to the funky little quasi-Art-Deco theater. But you'd have been wrong, had you been there to see the Jean
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Cocteau's final hour-which you probably weren't, because almost no one was; it was fully as anticlimactic as the single-screen's box office has been in recent days, an attrition that perhaps led up to parent company Trans-Lux's decision to say sayonara to the Cocteau.
While a half-dozen people huddled in their seats with lattes and popcorn, SFR spoke briefly with employee Ethan Thompson, remarkably cheerful given the fact that he's now out of a job. Thompson acknowledged that he'd seen numbers declining over time, though not as much in recent months: "We had pretty good audiences for
Grizzly Man
," he remembers, "and did well with
Walk the Line
." Perhaps Trans-Lux merely anticipated the crushing loss of revenue surely to have followed the new multiplexes projected to arrive in Santa Fe, especially the one planned for the Railyard; perhaps UA DeVargas increasingly snags the middlebrow art-film releases, thus explaining the unevenness of the Cocteau's recent offerings-veering between tricky foreign films (
Caché
), head-scratcher documentaries (
The Talent Given Us
), reasonably successful studio movies (
Hotel Rwanda
,
Oliver Twist
), local favorites (
Off the Map
) and well-intentioned shlock (
The Family Stone
,
Finding Neverland
)-and how long it's been since the protracted flapping of
Winged Migration
or that infamous six-month run of
Amélie
.
So many wonderful films in the last half-dozen years have screened at the Cocteau that there were pangs of nostalgia, sitting in a favorite seat and taking in those endearingly goofy local commercials. They were nothing compared to those felt when the feature presentation took over the screen; if you weren't there, at least you didn't miss much.
Mrs. Palfrey moves to
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London's Claremont Hotel; recently widowed, Mrs. P is determined to enjoy living independently, neither visiting nor returning her calls. She's begun to accept the loneliness and befriend the eccentric elders who share her new home, when a bad fall on the sidewalk leads to a chance meeting-with a handsome young writer, Ludovic Meyer (Rupert Friend,
Pride & Prejudice
). Ludo and Mrs. P. begin an intimate friendship that's never really fish nor fowl, part
Harold and Maude
and part
Tuesdays with Morrie
.
This all emerges as if it were a sentimentalized, shabbily made Channel Four sitcom. Its production values are appalling, score pure canned ham and script bogglingly trite, giving Plowright bromides such as "Always make the most of every moment" and "I would do it all over again" (though to her credit, she invests even these with genuine dignity). Rupert Friend (who could impersonate Orlando Bloom without anyone being the wiser-the two
of them should mount their own version of
Dead Ringers
) must be fatuous, too: "I suppose I miss the simplicity of the olden days." We defy you to find a 26-year-old Londoner capable of uttering such a sentence without snorting into his Red Bull.
At least the movie's carpe diem theme felt appropriate to the Cocteau's final evening. "Most of the things that mattered to me aren't around any more," offers Mrs. P. resignedly; as her film's hour upon the stage drew to its close, the patrons of the Jean Cocteau rummaged for keys, yawned, stood up and stretched as if it were any other Sunday night-
et sic transit gloria mundi
.
