Ranting to /dev/null

Prior to solar events

Jesse and Celine met for the first time almost exactly nine years ago, summer 1995, entirely at random, on a train to Vienna. This is the premise to Before Sunset, the sequal to the beautiful Before Sunrise, both directed by Richard Linklater and written by him and Kim Krizan. If you liked Before Sunrise, or if you were curious what happened to those two people, and especially if you were given a spasm of hope by their scene in Waking Life, you need to see this movie.

A warning though. With the notable exception of School of Rock, Linklater's movies consist almost entirely of people talking. Before Sunrise is the story of two people who meet and decide, on a whim, to get off the train and spend the next 14 hours together. The movie is basically just a record of the highlights of their extended conversation and nothing else. If this sounds boring, one of several things are possibly true: 1) You are not a very good conversationalist; 2) You don't have a very long attention span; or more charitably, 3) You think that most of the conversations that young lovers given to intellectual pretensions engage in are pretty wankish. While I would give the first two serious consideration, it's the last that has the most bearing on Before Sunrise. The beauty of that movie is that it shows something that really does happen in the way that it really does happen.

Romantic comedies have it all wrong: the guy doesn't finally win the girl's heart by some extravagent and pseudo-spontaneous single event which sets them on the path of perfect love for the rest of their lives. No, what happens is people talk. A lot. The beauty of Before Sunrise is in the fact that the conversations Jesse and Celine have are conversations that people getting to know each other actually have. Not only that, but if during your early twenties you've ever tried to get to know someone in whom you were romantically interested you'll recognize that you have had those exact conversations, or essential variations of them. Linklater captures the emotional tone exactly, right down to the two of them wanting to kiss in a listening booth at a used record store and completely chickening out. Linklater's forte is capturing these slice-of-life bits, and he is truly good at it, awkwardness and all.

Before Sunset takes place nine years later, summer 2004. Jesse is in Paris promoting his new book, a minor international bestseller, and Celine, living in Paris, shows up. Things go from there. There are actually a decent amount of plot twists involved, so I'm not going to go into detail, but suffice it to say that the early-twenties wanker has long been matured out of these two people. These people now have lives, careers, and are more or less established. So their meeting is a very different kind of thing.

Nonetheless, Linklater's craft has only improved with time. Quite a few of the conversations in Before Sunrise came of as set-pieces, and somehow failed to be entirely convincingly genuine. This happens a lot less frequently in Sunset, probably due in no small part to the fact that the abstract pretensions college students engage in are frequently abandoned as one realizes that one has better things to do. Additionally, whereas in Sunrise we were dealing essentially with strangers, in Sunset we're dealing with people who have a history, no matter how distant or brief. They have context. As real as Sunrise was, Sunset is possessed of an emotional depth its predecessor can't match.

Technically, Linklater has also improved with age. He uses almost entirely natural lighting. Lots of pure Parisian sunlight, down to the actors falling into shadow as their boat goes under a bridge. This also makes for some really lovely closeups. In one particularly impressive shot, Jesse and Celine are walking up a multi-floor spiral staircase, and the camera follows them at eye level the whole way up, rotating to keep them perfectly in frame.

Linklater has done it again.

Posted by ryan at July 12, 2004 08:09 PM | TrackBack