I took my daughter to see Taylor Swift’s Eras film – I was the one who ended up in tears

Parents who failed to get their children tickets to Taylor Swift's Eras tour can redeem themselves with the concert movie, in cinemas now. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

The Eras Tour film has opened in UK cinemas, relieving parents from the guilt of having missed out on the live shows. But does it compare?

I failed to buy my 13-year-old daughter Constance tickets for any of Taylor Swift’s run of concerts next year despite the fact that she and her friends seem to listen to no other music. The awful truth is that, faced with weeks of my life sat in virtual queues, I didn’t even try. It was only at the third time of Constance’s enquiring on the matter that I realised with horror this was a parenting error of such magnitude it was likely to entail years of therapy. For me if not for her.

Luckily Taylor, genius that she is, intuited this coming crisis and released a film of her Eras Tour in cinemas. I bought the most expensive tickets available in the hope of redemption. And so it was that yesterday, Constance, hair-waved and in a party dress, and me in my jeans, spent three hours watching the world’s biggest pop star – appropriately 19m-high on the giant screen – strutting her stuff.

At this point I would like to say that Constance screamed, wept, and threw her arms in the air. That we shared a bonding moment she and I will look back on in years to come. It didn’t quite turn out like that.

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The enthusiastic if sober crowd, peopled by fewer mother-daughter combinations than I’d expected and rather more be-sequined older girl groups, had been, apart from anything, ordered not to dance for fear they might tumble down the Imax’s vertiginous seating arrangement. So instead people had to jiggle in their seats, which is hard to do for the whole of a song without feeling a weirdo after 30 seconds – even when it is Shake it Off, Taylor’s best dancefloor banger.

Taylor Swift attends the premiere of her concert movie, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour in Los Angeles, California. Photo / Getty Images

Or, not jiggle, as it turned out in Constance’s case. She spent the whole film staring silently at the screen, motionless save for occasional mouthing of the words, and muted clapping.

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The fact is that 13-year-olds, it transpires, take everything in their stride. Even the greatest pop phenomenon of their age. And make no mistake, if you want to ‘get’ Taylor Swift, not as a music fan, but simply as a human interested in what charisma so staggering it can enchant a stadium of 70,000 people looks like, then see this movie. Extraordinary production values aside – the virtual snakes that appear to throttle the stage; the moment that Taylor appears to swim down the gangway – this film is a record of a performer of supreme talent bathing in their moment. At times it felt overwhelming to recognise this, and I found myself crying in my cinema seat.

Did Constance understand this? She certainly wasn’t in tears. Thirteen-year-olds are mystical beings. She’s just had her birthday. She asked for hair curlers and a giant fluffy toy bunny. Taylor is part of the air she breathes. “Some of those songs are just overplayed, Mummy,” she said when I asked her which her favourite number was (curious, since she does the playing, but anyway).

Yet as I put her to bed, I got an inkling that a little more might be going on beneath the surface. “Was it as good as you expected?” I wondered. “Oh even better,” came the breathless reply into her pillow.

Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour is in cinemas around New Zealand now