Now Playing at Theaters: Anxiety, Paranoia and Sometimes Elation

Total escapism will have to wait, though, as we get used to watching movies with sparse, socially distant crowds and abundant rules.

I’m finally back at Film Forum, watching porn. Not really. But I might as well be: Languorous, perfectly toned bodies writhe in “La Piscine,” the 1969 French erotic thriller taunting us from the screen. The stars, Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin, are impossibly beautiful and shirtless. Party guests mingle, superspreading their way to bad decisions. The flirting is criminal. Out in the audience, we sit stock still, at appropriately safe distances. There are 25 of us, tops. One attendee lowers her face covering a few inches, as if to catch a whiff of tanning lotion and Michel Legrand’s sultry music. Viewers around her tense up. An usher is summoned, discreetly asking for compliance. She raises her mask, but the employee lingers for a moment, making sure it sticks. (This is much better than what happened at a midday screening of Federico Fellini’s “La Strada,” when a flare-up over smuggled-in snacks threatened to plunge the anticipatory mood into fury.) As ever, the movies are showing us a reality that’s out of reach. That gap feels especially wide right now, as New York’s art houses and multiplexes reopen, shakily, and the C.D.C. relaxes safety guidelines, a development that has only added to the friction. The experience of being back isn’t quite what it used to be, at least not yet. Bathrooms are spotless to a spooky degree. The slick smell of popcorn butter — the oddly comforting aroma of Hollywood itself — hasn’t returned so far. Concessions are unavailable in many theaters. Deserted lobbies and empty escalators add to the overwhelming zombie-mall weirdness of it all.