Frankly, both movies are long on talk, and it's not the kind of stylized witty banter with which lovers in '30s comedies circled each other before coming together. As I recall, in the first movie Jesse and Céline mostly exchanged ideas they were excited about. Admirers of that movie praise it for getting right what two college kids who barely knew each other would actually talk about in that situation. (At the time, Roger Ebert wrote, "'Before Sunrise' is so much like real life--like a documentary with an invisible camera," and in Salon Linklater said of the look of Before Sunset, "I wanted it to seem like an eloquent documentary.") But that's more of a description than an aesthetic evaluation. I can believe that a date might run very much like what we see onscreen in Before Sunrise without wishing I were there to witness it. I wouldn't even want to sit through a faithful movie version of a date I had been on.
The new movie is even more painful in that Jesse and Céline spend a good part of the time talking about the earlier movie, which is halfway to assuming it was as momentous for us as it was for the characters. (Linklater has said that in making Before Sunset he and his stars were concerned about "capturing the magic again.") This is where the disjunction between naturalism and romanticism becomes a problem. The movie assumes that we'll be as involved in the couple's "magic" as they are, but the naturalistic approach to the dialogue can't help hook us. If it's supposed to be romantic, the movie needs some of the tricks that Linklater eschews, because a transcript of other people's experience just isn't romantic in aesthetic terms. It doesn't have the stylistic enhancements that convey the couple's intoxication to you, the lubrication that glides you past the improbabilities.
I don't actively want slickness from Linklater; I like his jeans-and-t-shirt approach to moviemaking. It's especially unusual in that he is interested in ideas. As he laments in this 2001 interview with IndieWire when speaking of his wonderful animated movie Waking Life:
The film culture has no room for ideas. The literary culture has some room, but not less than they should, and the academic culture has a lot, but there's no way to communicate it in a wide way. The pop culture tends to go to the lowest denominator, so cinema is in a weird place, due to its mass nature. It's diluted down to very little: simple stories and simple politics. So [Waking Life] is really challenging in that way. I thought I was sort of a conduit to a lot of ideas and energies and I honestly spit it back out in an interesting way.For all the talk, however, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset don't convey any ideas about anything except Linklater's naturalistic aesthetic experiment. Jesse and Céline's conversation could be on any subject.
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Article comments
1 - Cinnabar
--She comes across as an educated American boy's fantasy--an exotic girl who talks dirty and puts out but with whom he can communicate perfectly.
I am Chinese-American but have lived in Switzerland and am married to a German, and I happen to know many European women who have facets to their personalities much akin to those of Celine's from this movie - and many of them are quite beautiful also, even if not in that particular soulful slurred Botticelli way of Delpy's. And one of the most endearing things about many of these people is their irreverent mix of intellect and earthiness - so yes, someone might toss her tresses and follow up on Schopenhauer musings with an off-color joke. Because they don't see why talking about S/M and "pussy" would make one sordid - an unfortunate assumption many of my compatriots, including the intelligent author of the above article, share. So I would respectfully request that you consider reexamining your premise about her character being a pathetic American male fantasy.
I find your approach to Linkwater's balance between naturalism and romanticism useful. And would like to expound upon why "Before Sunrise" captures people falling in love with as much precision and poignancy as, let us say, the great love scenes from world literature: for example, the much-maligned "Jane Eyre," where the mercurial exchanges are really utterly unpredictable and show Rochester and Jane to gradually shed conventions and speak as if they were "before the chair of Judgment." "Before Sunset" does the same - it's not just a random mundane mall conversation. It also acts as wondrous foil for scenes such as the agricultural competition where Rudolph courts Emma in "Madame Bovary" - a scene whose scalpeling shows so much hypocrisy and lust-driven egotism between two human beings with perfect misunerstanding that it's more than enough to put a cynic off love forever. "Before Sunset" should be bundled with "Madame Bovary" - that's how strong an endorsement I am making.
Alas, my wrists hurt so the rest of my defense would have to wait for now.
2 - Alan Dale
Thank you for such a thoughtful comment. Your point about European women's mixing of soulfulness and earthiness is interesting, but I think you yourself are making unfair assumptions, in your use of the words "sordid" and "pathetic." Earthiness has always been a quality I've enjoyed in female friends, but I still think Delpy's character is too coy and romantic in a movieish way to make it convincing. And in any case I said "with whom he can communicate perfectly" in contrast to "exotic" not the fact that she speaks frankly about sex. I wasn't talking about WHAT she says but simply that although she has a heavy French accent her English is otherwise flawless. There's almost no realism in the movie in terms of the difficulty of communicating across languages. That's part of what makes it romantic. Linklater believes in eternal love at first sight and all that.
Which is a lot more than you can say for Flaubert. When you write that Before Sunset should be "bundled" with Mme. Bovary, I assume it's for the stark contrast. (I agree the comices agricoles couldn't possibly be more astringent.) Well, if you think Richard Linklater works on a level equal to Charlotte Bronte and Flaubert you should be e-mailing him not me!
Thanks again for writing.
3 - Cinnabar
--Well, if you think Richard Linklater works on a level equal to Charlotte Bronte and Flaubert you should be e-mailing him not me!
Goodness, I guess that was an extravagant claim, wasn't it? One does tend to get hyperbolic after viewing a film past 10 pm. And yes, of course the bundling would be for the stark contrast. Flaubert is essential to human life, but his Emma is ultimately two-dimensional -- one of the loveliest unsympathetic characters in literature whose complexity is formal, not human. (Her shallow sentimentality regarding Berthe her daughter; her hypocrisy when doing work for the poor, for whom she cared not the snap of her finger; the cold calculation towards money at the end; her inability ultimately to love people rather than things - she was selfishness and illusions incarnate.) While "Before Sunset" is on a far smaller scale than Flaubert, the richness of Celine and the mutuality of the two characters do a lot to mitigate, for example, the selfish staling domesticity of Leon and Emma. A scrap of Venetian velvet versus an enormous tapestry of this vanity fair which the Chinese call "the realm of crimon dust."
-- There's almost no realism in the movie in terms of the difficulty of communicating across languages. That's part of what makes it romantic. Linklater believes in eternal love at first sight and all that.
Ah, I must plead personal bias there, since Chinese was my mother tongue and German that of my partner's, and our language in common is English. So of course I would need to think that all romantic intercultural communication is infallibly crystalline. ^^ Joking aside, Linkwater has his commercial considerations, so too much play on intercultural complexity would not do. Moreover, many Europeans are indeed quite well-versed in English down to our idiom and habits, and he took care to show that Celine lived in NY for years and works on international issues (for example, going to India) where English is the working language. And then there are the "bomb/bum" "messy/merci" moments. So Linkwater is somewhat grounded on that communication issue.
But I don't want to cavil any more, since anyone game enough to love James in his magnificent later phase is my buddy. (I've translated two pages of the Spoils of Poynton into Chinese thus far; well, that's more the middle period i suppose - in Chinese one can grammatically eschew subjects and causality, so that is very handy, but on the other hand I may have to slice his sentences into halves or even thirds. Quite bloody.)
Here's what is important - I enjoyed reading you, and think that Linkwater should make his next sequel on the perils of intercultural communication between Celine and Jesse after years togeter - and its rewards. In my own personal case we have always known we can grossly misunderstand each other, and so we always speak plainly and explore all of our assumptions. And actually we probably avoid more misunderstanding than many couples supposedly from the same background. For one thing, we both grew up watching Japanese renditions of "Sans Famille" and "Heidi" - I in Taiwan, he in Germany, even though he did not know that it was Japanese. Linkwater can probably have a fieldtrip with that.
4 - Alan Dale
While it wouldn't be true to say I've never received such a detailed, absorbing, personal response to my reviews, I can say I don't get them often enough. And it always makes my day when I do. You broke right through the isolation that calcifies the writer's life, you brought the world into my skull. Thank you. Please tell everyone you know to read me.