And once a week, on cheap Tuesdays, I get to go all out for the thrill of entering a dark room full of strangers, to share some unplanned and intimate moments. What am I watching? Who cares. For six bucks it could even be Hannibal. There’s the squelch of Becel on popcorn, the creak of lowering plush seats, and then that moment when a stranger’s knee brushes yours as they head to their seat – and, this being Canada, you both apologise. Point of contact. I love going to the movies, alone.

Samuel Beckett thought that cinemas were lonely places of enforced isolation. The seating forces you to look only at the screen, and the darkness prevents you from seeing other cinemagoers. But we go to the cinema to watch human beings. Surely the keyhole-peeping that lies behind the universal popularity of movies is – usually – a solitary activity. Can there be a community of voyeurs? There you are, in the dark, with a 30 ft. high, semi-naked Russell Crowe, telling you his secrets. You and a few dozen other men and women engaged in Olympic-standard synchronized drooling. It’s a strange bond, this darkened communing of desire that ends the moments the lights come up, and we head clumsily for the door.

It makes me think (with a shudder) of going to see Romance at the Cambridge Picturehouse, far too early on a Sunday morning. It was a critics’ preview, for all of three critics, and a random old man. Distracted by the frustration of my male companion (apparently, there wasn’t enough sex in the movie), I stopped watching the screen and looked over my shoulder to study the reaction of the local hack. It was pretty easy to see: he’d split. Trenchcoat guy was still there. He was still there as we were leaving, battered fedora placed firmly over his lap. Not my kinda community, but then it wasn’t my kind of film.

After two years of seeing films from Deep Blue Sea to Ghost Dog with that same male companion, I find that, like Marlene, I vant to be alohn. To keep my opinions and my Pick n Mix to myself. I’m in movie rebound, and loving it. I can see what I want, when I want. No longer the voice that says, “God, this is so obvious, Bruce Willis is dead. Duh, only the kid can see him.” Never again will I be forced to see a war movie, or anything involving sharks. It felt like being in the dog-house for a while, but now it’s the art-house. If I could rush up and lick the subtitles off the screen, I would. I’ve discovered my inner movie whore.

Toronto is paradise for cinema sluts. It has multiplexes, miniplexes, hip first runs, kooky single-screen second runs, museum cinemas, and a guy who shows movies in his living room, complete with his insane Marxist analysis of cinema history. I love them all. Each attracts its own community, by its location and reputation, as Dorothy Richardson chronicles in 1930s Paris in her articles for Close Up. A Wednesday matinee of Bring It On and the opening Friday night of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon – on the same screen – are like different worlds. Beckett is wrong. The experience depends as much on watching the audience as on watching the film. I’ve sat behind Jared Leto at the Canadian premiere of Requiem for a Dream. A stranger gave me a tissue at the end of Dancer in the Dark, and another stranger reprimanded me for shrieking during The Gift. These anonymous encounters make cinemagoing like dancing at a crowded club, absorbed in the music and reflecting the changing lights. But sometimes it can feel Beckettian, lost for someone with whom to share that continuity error in Cast Away.

So finally I braved the movie date, for a Toronto Women’s Bookstore preview of Aimee and Jaguar. Talk about a film community: women crowding the foyer, trading anecdotes and kisses. As for my date, not sure whether she was ‘in’ or ‘out’, I was trying to discover whether her taste in movies might indicate her taste in, er, me. The date movie is predicated in opposition to Beckett’s lonely room: watch the events on screen through another person’s face. Make the connection.

Aimee and Jaguar details the highly-charged relationship between Lily Wust, an ideal Deutsche-madchen wife and mother in 1940s Berlin, and Felice Schragenheim, a Jewish lesbian Communist resistance worker. As they progressed from fascinated friendship to fraught foreplay, my eyes flicked between the images on the screen, and their reflection in my madchen’s eyes. Was that a hint of identification? A laugh of fellow feeling? Or simply an appreciation of fine filmmaking? But then, who wouldn’t be absorbed in this rich history, or charmed by the Golden Globe-nominated performances, and galvanized by the witty, thoughtful script. Diagnosis: she likes films like I like films.

Amidst the auras of two hundred women passionately focused on the film, it was ever-harder to elucidate my date’s individual reaction. Once Lily and Felice fell into each other’s arms, I lost myself in what could be called a psychic orgy: simultaneously aware of the en masse arousal in the room, and alone in my head with the fantasy images of Lily shaking and shuddering under Felice’s hands and mouth. It’s no coincidence that movies and masturbation have gone self-in-hand since the former’s inception. Reminds me of Woody Allen’s joke about going to see Schindler’s List [stop reading here if you’re easily offended]: someone told him to take a box of Kleenex, and, leaving the cinema, he commented that he didn’t see much to wank over.

Together alone in that darkened room, the catharsis of theatre and the climax of pornography come together. As it were. Did Felice keep her woman? Go see the movie. Did I? Watch this space.

Sophie Levy