(As a side note, I wonder if this title will overall do well for the movie's box office or hurt it. On the one hand, it seems to promise to titillate. On the other, you do have to face the person selling you the ticket and actually speak that title out loud, in which moment you can't help but be self-conscious.)
Greeting me inside the small (about 20 seats) screening room was a set of increasingly interesting sights.
Of the about seven people scattered throughout the theater, only one struck me as in any way the target audience for this film (and that includes myself, I suppose). She was what appeared to be a mid-20s Black woman with very hip stylings. She might have had a friend with her, she might not. I didn't get a second good look at her later because she was sitting in a row behind me and she left pretty much as soon as the credits started.
The rest were a truly eclectic bunch:
A woman who appeared to be in her 60s.
A man about my age, maybe a little younger, who spent the entire trailers talking on his phone to someone in the area just outside the entrance, where we could easily hear him and were becoming steadily annoyed by his violation of social etiquette, even before the movie had started.
An older man, though it was hard to tell how old because of his COVID mask, in a fully mechanized wheelchair that was pushed to the right side of the area just in front of the front row, for obvious reasons of accessibility.
And a much older man in the seat closest to the exit on the left side of the front row, who was at least 75.
I thought the guy on the phone was going to be our biggest problem, but then this happened:
At the start of the trailer for the Luca Guadagnino tennis movie Challengers -- whose trailer I have seen about six times now -- the 75-year-old man stood up, faced us, and said something along the lines of this, in a loud and perturbed voice:
"This movie features a lot of tennis players who smoke. This is a product placement by the tobacco industry. No real tennis players would ever smoke. This is a crappy American movie."
And then he sat down.
I considered piping up that Guadagnino was Italian, but thought better of it.
I'd never seen this sort of thing before. And frankly, it annoyed me. Not because of the message -- sure, it is for the betterment of society if you try to prevent people from smoking -- but because he thought it was his responsibility to send it to us, when at least half of us were over 50 and none of us were likely tennis players. (Actually, I am a tennis player, but he probably wouldn't have known that by looking at me.) Given our collective age, we decided whether we intended to smoke or not a long time ago.
The funny thing was, this was actually an alternate version of the Challengers trailer than the one I'd seen the other five times, which does indeed feature a lot of casual smoking among these world-class athletes. There isn't all the casual smoking here, but there is a very pointed moment where the tennis player played by Josh O'Connor asks the tennis player played by Zendaya to come outside and have a smoke with him, holding out a dark blue pack of cigarettes.
As if to purposefully tweak this guy, or perhaps reinforce what he was saying, Zendaya shuts him down and tells him she doesn't smoke. And then there's a long beat and she closes her laptop, I guess indicating that she succumbed to the request. (And because I've seen the other trailer, which reveals the whole story, I know that things don't go particularly well for her, so maybe they were trying to hint at that with this bit in the trailer.)
When the actual movie started -- and, thank God, the man on the phone finally ended his conversation -- the first thing that happened was that the characters lit up a cigarette every one minute on screen. I thought this was hilarious. The old man may be boycotting Challengers, but the actual movie he came to see featured what I would assume is far more smoking than that film. In the first few minutes alone, the girls humorously commiserate a pack of cigarettes lost to the ocean water when they go for a spontaneous swim, and then when they arrive at their hotel, one of them dumps about half a pack of cigarettes into a frying pan, though I did not entirely understand what she was trying to accomplish there. The rest of the movie features a regular succession of more traditional smoking moments in the midst of drunken hedonism.
I regularly checked in on the guy for signs of visible annoyance, but I saw none. I did wonder what had brought this cantankerous old coot out to How to Have Sex in the first place. Maybe the aforementioned titillation promised by the title. Dirty old buzzard.
He did inexplicably leave with about ten minutes remaining in the movie, though he did not appear to be annoyed when he did so, and there was nothing particularly confronting that had just happened on screen to prompt it. Maybe his bladder finally caught up to him.
Some of the explanation for this motley bunch lies in the fact that the screening was at 4:20, which is before most employed adults get out of work. But most of these people seeing this movie at all was somewhat unusual.
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