Before Sunset: Talk to Me
During the first month of our marriage—exactly ten years ago this month—my wife and I attended a little film entitled Before Sunrise (1995) in north Austin. We hadn’t heard much about this movie which would all but disappear only a few weeks later, but were willing to gamble away a couple hours, especially as my status as part-time employee at the local theater meant free tickets.
Before Sunrise details the brief, chance relationship of two college students—an American male and French female—who meet on a train as it pulls into Vienna. My wife and I immediately connected with the characters’ situation, as they were our own age at the time, and we too had begun to know one another intimately while taking a long walk through a European city. We were absolutely stunned by the emotional honesty and realistic dialogue writ large on the screen by director Richard Linklater, a fellow Austinite. With four years of alternately blessed and embattled dating plus a couple weeks of pretty strange conjugal experience behind us, we recognized much in the characters’ surprisingly honest, comprehensive discussions about core relational, social and ethical issues.
The absence of a manipulative musical score, a profusion of lengthy stead-cam shots, and the noticeably truncated and sedate plot allowed our attention to rest fully on dialogue. The talk was the thing. Over the course of a single night’s perambulation through Vienna, Jesse and Celine covered questions concerning love’s ephemerality, death and the possibility of an afterlife, family and parental influence, and even the mimetic potential of visual art.
Nine years later, Linklater and the film’s two stars co-wrote and produced a sequel to what had since become a cult hit. My wife and I hadn’t had a chance to see Before Sunset (2004) in the theatre, so we viewed it last Friday on DVD. Once again, we were struck by the raw force of the characters’ words and thoughts as they took another walk, this time through Paris. As one of the characters has married since their tête-à-tête years before, a new moral dimension complicates their second meeting, laced as it is with the same sexual tension and overtly sexualized (sometimes crude) discourse which occasionally dotted their first encounter. For audience members like myself who hold marriage sacrosanct, this necessarily makes for a considerable measure of extended discomfort. The film is, however, redeemed by its verisimilitude, its willingness to directly engage and linger over life’s hardest questions—whatever you may think of the characters’ own conclusions.
written January 6, 2005
Posted by Paul Marchbanks at May 10, 2005 12:01 AM