Before Sunrise was filmed in 1994 and released the next year, so, as of the last time I saw it (this morning), it’s about fourteen years old. It seems appropriate, for a film so entwined with the passage of time, that time has proved to bear its viewers and creators so little reverence while leaving the film its self rather pristine and unruffled. Given the look of the people and atmosphere of the film, unless you are intimately familiar with Vienna and how it looked then versus now, or overly concerned with the glaring lack of cellphones and post Y2K tech intrusions, the events might just as well have occured last week as 1994.
The main characters are Jesse and Celine, two attractive people on a Eurail train heading for Vienna. She, a Parisian, has just come from Budapest and he, an American, from Madrid.
There is so much hidden history in that sentence; Eurail is a commercial confederation of international railroad concerns linking nearly the entire continent. Budapest is the capitol of Hungary, originally a Celtic settlement; it has passed through Roman, Mongol, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rule in its history. Mohammed I, Emir of Cordoba, and ruler of Muslim Spain founded Madrid on the sight of old Visigoth settlements in the 9th century C.E. It is now the third largest municipality in the E. U. Vienna has a history similar to that of Budapest accept that it managed to repel Ottoman invasion. All those facts stand in place for millions of lives and events, that’s history’s job, to condense a glut of persons and time into digestible facts.
Art though, and film most of all, refocuses on the intimate and particular. To that end we meet Jesse and Celine, on a train heading into Vienna. Jesse is a gangly young man with obtrusive symmetrical features. One knows before speaking to him that he’s American. The comfortable unironic way he lounges in jeans and Chuck Taylors, reading a book about a salacious dissipated film figure, the Biography of Klaus Kinski.
Julie Delpy as Celine is a bit less reducible to country of origin, dressed in manner mixing the sensible and sensuous, soft features but keen eyes; she could be cousin of either Bardot or Garbo. You cannot place her country anymore than you could say which state Jesse is from.
They strike up a conversation, precisely the conversation we’ve all imagined having upon seeing a beautiful stranger, effortless yet endearingly awkward. They decide to disembark together and spend Jesse’s last night in Europe together, wandering Vienna.
At this point a cynic believes the film is doomed. How can such a pitch of tenuous intimacy and trepidation be maintained? Such a thing is hard enough in life, how might a film manage it?
But, Before Sunrise walks that tightrope of soulfulness and authenticity. It juggles the characters, endearing them to each other and us by equal measures of dialogue and silence. The film is a dream come nearly true. It could only be better if actually occurring to the viewer.
The film ends on a question mark, Jesse and Celine have fallen in love but must part. Will they ever see echother again? I remember living with such affection for that uncertainty. It somehow validated youthful optimism to only have the memory of their one night and the possibility of more.
So the sequel, announced for release in 2004, struck me as imminent doom, no matter the outcome. I was finally the age of the characters, early twenties, by the time the sequel was released and the last thing in the world I wanted to know was how it all turned out.
I really liked this movie and its sequel, for several personal reasons, above all. Of course, I regard Linklater as perhaps the finest (and most representative) director of the Gen X generation, who also made the hallmark film of his tribe, Slacker, as well as the intensely dramatic Tape, and two of the most brilliant semi-animated mind fuck films that falls into the prescient pre-Simulationist category, Waking Life (in which Hawke and Delphy briefly appear) and A Scanner Darkly.
ReplyDeleteBut the real reason I love Before Sunrise is that my wife and I traveled on the Orient Express to Vienna and Budapest back at the end of the summer of 2004, right before I came back to the States. We were boyfriend and girlfriend back then, and we didn´t know if our relationship would last our separation, even though we´d been going out for two years. I was in that ¨zeitgeist moment¨as it were--I was Ethan Hawke when I saw the film years later in my own projected imaginings, and Inma was Julie. Their meanderings through the crown jewel of the Hapsburgs were our existential dreaming, their romance mirrored ours.
I think Linklater got almost everything right in this film (the seeming contiguity of the plot, its effortless falling into place, this is how romances do happen on a Eurrail trip for young people in Europe if their lucky as I was or my brother Patrick who met his wife Monika in a similiar way and now lives in Norway with her, as I live in Spain with my beloved.)
In the comment above (self-immolating chuckle) I meant to say 1994, not 2004: Inma and I took our tour of Berlin, Prague, Krakow, Vienna, Budapest, Venice, Florence, Sienna and Rome the same year as Linklater made his film.And we got married a year later, after we´d been separated not by almost a decade but by only a few months. Hawke and Delphy´s characters don´t seize the moment, but we did, and stayed in touch. Now we´ve been married for 13 years.
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