To Russell Square in London last Thursday evening for the launch of a new six-screen cinema, the Curzon Bloomsbury, on the site of the old Renoir. When a rebranding was first mooted cautiously back in 2008, I wasn’t a fan of the idea. I’m still not. But having explored the spectacular £4m redesign job, I’m an admirer of the building itself. It is now one of the few cinemas in London where the experience of watching a film will actually be enhanced by the surroundings. Let’s refer to it as Renoir: Fully Loaded.
The designer and architect Takero Shimazaki hosted a short presentation in which he shared the inspirations behind the radical new look. The first image he unveiled was a still from Stalker – a dank, peeling, dripping room in which several disconsolate figures are clustered. This, he said, was what he showed the Curzon management when he took on the job. Nervous titters all round. What Shimazaki was doing here was highlighting the mix of sobriety and playfulness that is discernible in his designs, as well as making us the first-ever witnesses to Tarkovsky-based humour. It’s a niche area but it works. Not unlike the cinema itself.
He showed several photographs of the building in various states of disrepair and construction. Why, he wondered, pondering over an image of scaffolding and ladders and plastic sheeting, could an audience not watch a movie in a setting like that, with a screen hung at one end? Ah, a man after my own heart. Anything to stem the flow of servers ferrying bowls of olives and flutes of champagne to cinemagoers who have mistaken their local cinema for dinner theatre or something on the chicken-in-a-basket circuit.
Shimazaki didn’t go as far as to put the auditoria in the midst of a building site but there is a hint of the austere to the Curzon Bloomsbury, plush as it is. Grey mottled high-ceilinged corridors lead you in a curve around the side of the largest screen. The one named “Renoir”, that is; the one with the word Renoir hung on the back wall in white letters. None of that “Screen 1” and “Screen 2” business. Each one here is named after a London cinema – Minema, Lumiere, and so on. One exception is the Bertha Dochouse screen, which will be devoted permanently to a programme of documentaries.
There is also pink concrete in evidence on the stairs. You don’t see much of that around, do you? And an optical trick in one of the corridors as you pass a series of glass panels, staring into them in a search for your reflection – vainly in both senses of the word, it transpires, since these are windows that look onto the parallel corridor. You may see someone you know in there but you can’t reach them because the glass is in the way. You have to go to the end of the corridor and double-back instead. This is either a comment on the fragile divides which separate one human being from another, or a gimmick that is going to get very old very quickly. I’m going with the former, even if it does suggest the makings of a Paul Haggis film about how we should all just get along and, you know, connect.
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