Before Sunset

I’m skipping. It was like Christmas Eve for days before this movie, and its been Christmas Day ever since. I’ve got good cause. Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s swooning 1993 romance for the Douglas Coupland generation is one of those movies you just succumb to, or you don’t, and I’m militantly entrenched in the former camp. Like much of the director’s output, it’s essentially a film about kids hanging out, but the languid structure swirls into the most singularly heart-wrenching and authentic depiction of those inarguable bolt-of-lightning, take-me-I’m-yours connections ever. For those lucky enough to be among the converted (the rest of you can get your coats on the way out) Sunrise’s deceptively low-key approach punkishly tore-up the rulebook, dispensed with conventional notions of plot and hit you right where it aches.
It helped of course, that the central couple were people you could easily fall in love with – the beautiful bohemian French chick Celine (Julie Delpy) and the soulful backpacking slacker Jessie (Ethan Hawke). This Romeo and Juliet for those who can remember where they were when Kurt died, hooked up in Before Sunrise for a night of talking and fucking in Vienna, knowing throughout that they would have to part in the morning.
A gushing, perceptive affair-to-remember wherein the drama lay purely in the pregnant exchanges, the movie’s tagline posed the conundrum ‘Can the greatest romance of your life last more than one night?’ This enquiry was made all the more poignant by the wistful, ambiguous ending where Celine and Jesse agree to re-unite six months later. They may have been pulled together like polestars, but would life somehow get in the way?
The transcendent Before Sunset – the most eagerly awaited sequel of the summer (well, in my house anyway) - holds the answer. Naturally, fans of the original may be apprehensive. Why spoil a memory so perfect? Isn’t the not knowing easier? Don’t paths-not-taken crystallize into lost ideals precisely because they’re untouched by reality?
Well, fear not, this is the ultimate second date – full of apprehensive giddy, dizzy, sad, affecting little thrills. Set nine years after that first blissful encounter, Jesse is now a novelist publicising his book (actually a thinly veiled account of his time with Celine) in Paris. He’s wearily married, and clearly just hanging in there for the sake of his son, at one point remarking “I feel like I’m running a nursery with someone I used to date”.
Celine hasn’t fared much better romantically. Now an environmental activist, she’s drifted through lovers without ever feeling anything like the instantaneous wash of that Vienna night. She surprises him at his final European bookstore appearance, and they talk for the eighty minutes that remain before he leaves Paris, tracing the figurative footsteps of Rohmer and Eustache.
The appealing authenticity of this real-time structure is dreamily enriched by the gorgeous, naturalistic wordplay. The script involved Delpy and Hawke (as well as Linklater and regular writing partner Kim Krizan), and the resulting exchanges pile up and get stripped away like a dramatic chattering symphony, underscored by teasing, self-deprecating humour. (Just check out Delpy’s reference to Hawke’s real-life transgressions – Is that Parisian traffic grinding in the background, or Uma Thurman’s teeth?)
It would be unbelievably horrible to divulge anything further. Suffice to say, Celine and Jesse are older, wiser, and still the most enchanting of screen couples. Linklater’s audacious formula once again yields a brilliantly paradoxical film – intellectual, yet smouldering, intense, yet jovial, and seemingly inert, yet tumultuous.
The camera follows Delpy like an adoring puppy-dog, in intoxicating long-takes, gazing as longingly as our lovers do at each other. And yes, they do remain madly, passionately and desperately in love after all this time. But who could blame them? He’s casually, bewitchingly melancholic, and she remains my favourite Bataille-wielding heroine - a fantastic rag-bag of endearingly girlish neuroses, with enough comedic skills to deflect from her earnestness.
In a year that’s brought the remarkably astute, genuinely lyrical Lost In Translation and the basking glory of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Linklater’s film is still out there on its own; a blazing, heart-stoppingly beautiful prayer for lapsed cynics everywhere. Perfection. I’m completely, out-of-my-head, swept-off-my-feet in love. More sequels, please. Now, how often do you hear me say that?