*** (out of ****)
Starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy
Directed by Richard Linklater & written by Linklater and Kim Krazin
1995
101 min R
A handsome young American has one day left before he has to quit roaming Europe and fly back to the States. On his final train trip he meets a cute French girl, they start talking, and they get along really well. He tells her: what if we’re meant to be together? Why don’t we spend my last night in Europe wandering around Vienna, getting to know each other? He’s a little bit more cunning than that, implying that if she finds out what a jerk he is now she won’t be plagued with feelings of the-road-not-taken a decade later. Smiling, she agrees.
That’s the set-up for Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise,” and the result is a cross between “My Dinner with Andre” and “Lost in Translation” (any movie can be defined as a combination of any other two movies). There are no silly movie contrivances to keep them apart, no stolen jewels, no walking-in-on-him-getting-kissed-by-a-hooker, no misunderstandings, no I-thought-I-hated-him-but-it-turned-out-I-loved-him-all-along. Even the contrivance of the two of them only having one night together is not really a contrivance. How many conversations have we started up on airplanes, bus stations, waiting in lines? What about that person we met at a party but we were never able to assemble the right combination of friends again so that she would reappear? All these “what-if” situations. There is nothing to keep Julie and The Hawke apart but the mysteries of the human mind.
Luckily the Yank and the Frenchie are both good talkers. If this were a Sergio Leone movie, he and she would just stare at each other for a while in terrifically dirty locations and then be in love. He (Ethan Hawke) and she (Julie Delpy) walk and talk about old romances, parents, death, men vs. women, idealized love vs. the real thing, reincarnation, so on and so forth.
A pal of mine referred to Linklater’s movies as “bong-hit philosophy.” I’ve no idea if he coined this phrase himself or just plucked it out of the ether, but it accurately describes Linklater’s pleasure in skimming from the surface of one deep topic to the other. The topic itself is seldom what we enjoy; the allure is the joy of mental exercise, of showing-off, and of wordplay. Good conversationalists are good at talking, not at what’s behind the talking. Linklater, who directed and co-wrote “Before Sunrise,” has a good ear for young people talking when they want to sound smart. There’s a great moment in his “Waking Life” in which four hip young men march down an Austin sidewalk, talking deep thoughts in stern declarative sentences, and we realize that each dude’s declaration does not reflect anything that was said before it. “Before Sunrise” has another such moment in its last act, when The Hawke, after much pseudo-intellectual babbling, complains about how he’s getting tired of all his pseudo-intellectual babbling.
All you need to obliterate the city blocks and planets and entire galaxies in the movies is a gigantic pile of money to pay for the special effects, but no amount of cash can ensure that two people talking can be made interesting. “Before Sunrise” depends almost entirely on writing and acting, and Julie and The Hawke do a fine job. I like that neither of them is a person of strong convictions; they are all questions and no answers, enamored with wonder, and they seldom argue because the world is still so fresh that they can’t be certain enough of any belief to defend it. Linklater enhances the you-are-there feeling by directing each scene with as few edits as possible. On the one hand this puts the actors under greater pressure to not goof their lines, but on the other it allows their conversations to develop a natural rhythm.
The final act of “Before Sunrise” develops a bittersweet tone as the two young people realize that, no matter how much they like each other, they’ll probably never see each other again. There is no cure for the dreaded “what-if?” syndrome. If the movie has a fault, it might be that their romance did not ever quite feel compelling to me. They’re good looking kids and they get along just fine and have no shortage of things to talk about. But are they soulmates, destined to be together? I wasn’t convinced; I could go either way. But maybe that’s the point. Movies tend to make love and destiny a binary thing—it either is or it isn’t—but in real life it takes forever before we can be sure.
My generation’s first major exposure to the “independent movie” was in the theatres and video stores of the 1990s. To those of my age who saw it then, “Before Sunrise” is probably more meaningful than to those of us who kept meaning to get around to it but needed the upcoming sequel “Before Sunset” to kick us into shape. I regret not seeing it at the same time that I saw “Reservoir Dogs” and “Clerks,” when it would have affected me more. Now I’m older and the moves of the ‘90s film school flicks have been copied and copied. I’m trying to make an analogy between the timing of tragic young love and our exposure to stories about tragic young love, but it just isn’t working. Try to make the connection yourself.
Finished June 27th, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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