REVIEW/JOURNAL/LOVE: WHY BEFORE SUNSET GETS TO ME SO MUCH

I saw Before Sunset again for the million time and I have to say .Before Sunset is the undisputed, unrivaled movie of my life. 

It isn’t the movie of my life in that it tells my story or any one short story I’ve lived. It does tell one I would love to have lived. A story I could at one point visualize sketched somewhere in my future. Waiting to be outlined with a firmer hand and then colored.

I didn’t get my Before Sunrise/Sunset, but I did get to experience aspects of it I love, like the intimacy forged with places as a consequence of a story set in them. I develop these bonds with places easily, I’m sometimes inspired to write about them 

You could say Before Sunset is the movie of my life in the same vein one might call a person the love of their life. The one that stands out and calls for more than just polite appreciation. The one you feel passionate about beyond apparent reason. The one you find simply impossible to admire sedately since he/she/it touches on such personally precious snippets of who you are and so clearly gets how you feel.

There’s so much mystery to words, so often such inordinate incompatibility between words and the people who use them. There’s such vulnerability to people, such a crippling fear of being the only one to feel something or say something, as though that brand of solitude might make you irrevocably wrong. Wrong as in a knot that could never be undone. And curiously, to counter that fear, to ridicule it even, there’s always someone to understand you. In the absence of a visible, palpable someone, there’s always an invisible, ghostly someone, behind something that understands you. And that’s what Before Sunset is to me. Something that miraculously understands me. Flesh and blood writers I only know by name behind words fashioned into made up people who actually understand me.

There’s a Bjork quote I read once in some music magazine to never forget that concurs with that line of thought, conveys that same feeling:

There are certain emotions in your body that not even your best friend can sympathize with, but you will find the right film or the right book, and it will understand you.

Before Sunset is more than familiar with this crippling fear that plagues its characters and me both. There’s a whole lot of contained fear to adorn the threshold that is the unsettling prospect of seeing a consequential someone again, after a history gone on hiatus. Any change even if slight, any amount of time gone by, is sure to throw human beings off. Suddenly we don’t know if what was still is. Suddenly we don’t know if it’s even still acceptable for what was to still be. We’re so easily paralyzed by the accepted transience of things to allow for any one truth to remain that truth indefinitely.

At the beginning of the movie, towards the end of a meet the press event (as part of his book tour), Jesse randomly turns his head 90º to the right to find Celine, against all possible odds, right THERE… eyes on him, listening, mere steps away, all of nine years later. Thinner, older, changed and yet the same.

That’s about as exciting and frightening a moment as I can imagine. There’s profound uncertainty to it, regret, possible estrangement, possible ill feelings (as human beings are so apt to inspire in one another). There’s the tingling euphoria of something of a dream come true, any one thing you never thought might actually transpire, suddenly materialized. Not so much as something to be only seen or only heard or only felt but experienced with every sense, an actual consequential bubble of a moment you’re to submit to and experience from the inside. There’s also caution. A tyrannical impulse to retreat, observe and to a certain extent, playact rather than just be. Celine gives in to that impulse more willfully than Jesse. She’s so clearly calculating, so intent on weighing what she can and cannot say, what she should and should not say, carefully painting the portrait of herself she’s selected as the most suitable under the circumstances, misusing words, deliberately misrepresenting herself here and there. All amidst some real profound truths, subtly revealed. Somehow safer truths. Outnumbered truths. Needles amidst hay.

If I were to diagram Jesse’s and Celine’s journeys in both Sunrise and Sunset, I’d start them off at diagonally opposed points and trace their way toward each other in perpendicular lines that would ultimately converge in a single common point of intimacy, thus sketching a solid rectangle of history and intimacy, if you will. Easy enough intimacy in the past (Sunrise) and given the trickiness of a hiatus, reluctant in the present (Sunset). Something like this…

Any hiatus is tricky, however long it may last. Things change fast. Faster, it seems, when we’re not looking. The outside of things is relentless in how freely it gives in to transformation almost as a belly laugh at our expense. While the inside is limited to whoever’s inside might be in question. Restricted to the one person with access. Impossible to assess with certainty on a case by case basis, let alone, generalize.

Jesse and his obvious transformations, the scar-like lines on his face, a deflated version of his younger self, physically dried out like a plum turned prune… Celine and her sharper thoughts, so often preceded by ‘I don’t knows’ which wholly misrepresent her, some gained self-assurance that tweaks her image and yet leaves her core untouched… In spite of the clear cut changes, all that was still is.

The movie is one long battle to see through the layers, the misrepresentations, to sift the minor details (of marriage, relationships, children, major changes, all aided and abetted by the passage of time) from the bigger picture and clear the path for the difficult admission that yes, what was still is. In so many ways, what was will always be.

Which, I guess, is why the scene on the boat, the stretch of it I insist on calling ‘Little things’ works so magically on me. Little things are simply fascinating to me. Little things become huge in my often weird perspective.

The first time I saw the boat scene, I saw myself. I sat in a dark screening room, my heart struggling to cope with the void left by a recent break-up, I saw myself and I cried at the reminder that it would take a while for that piece of my heart to regenerate. I also felt sorry for her. And I wished dearly I could be more like the ones who “move on like they would’ve changed brand of cereal.” During that boat ride, Celine finally lets down her guard, allows herself to be seen for exactly who she is, her every vulnerability stamped across her face, traces of self-awareness everywhere.

I’m keenly aware of how rare that kind of openness is, of how rarely we feel safe enough to bare our souls to a fellow human being and not worry whether we’ll be corresponded or understood. Most of the time, we resort to hiding as best we can, until the other person goes first. If they go first.

It’s inevitable that along the way we turn inward. There is to every story a loss of innocence so personally colossal that you can’t help but turn inward and invest on control. Somewhere between Sunrise and Sunset, Celine, despite her easy and outgoing nature, turned further inward than was natural to her. It’s easy to picture the mourning, pining and longing that followed her missed opportunity at true connection. It’s a possible loss we invest our rooting powers in at the end of Sunrise and commiserate in retrospect at the opening of Sunset. Paradoxically, we are creatures of the moment in spite of how difficult it is to actually be in the moment. Our belief in things has too short a shelf life. We need constant reassurance. She does. And I do. We know for a fact that things are designed to change in a flash and yet that readiness for change is not reflected on us, not in the recesses of our hearts, and not on our views from within as dictated by our feelings. Making us different. Lonelier. Willing to wait when most everybody around us either claims or appears not to see the point.

It seems unthinkable that other people might be that very kind of different. Same as we are. And equally unthinkable to other people that we might. And so complications are manufactured, walls put up, gaps created, obstacles placed. Complications, walls, gaps and obstacles which in the end only serve to keep us from one another.

To keep the real us from one another.



PART 2


Sometimes movies affect me so deeply that I just need to spread the word. Before Sunset is one of them. Ok, so the movie starts with young handsome American Jesse, travelling abroad & currently on a train headed for Vienna. A beautiful young French girl, Céline, sits down near Jesse & the the two get chatting about life.  Engrossed in coversation, Jesse convinces Céline to get off the train with him in Vienna & walk around with him all night exploring the city until he has to get on a plane heading back to America at sunrise at which point she can hop back on the train & continue on her journey.

The whole movie is based on this fabulous new conversation & relationship between the young pair in the hours they have with each other before sunrise.  Needless to say there is a strong & magical connection between them.  The conversation is young & engaging & real.  They fall in love with other & have an amazing night.  At the end of the movie, without exchanging any details whatsoever, they agree tp meet up again at the train station in exactly 6 months time.

The second movie, 'Before Sunset', starts with Jesse doing a book tour in Paris.  He wrote a book about one magical night in Vienna with a French girl.  Hmmm, sound familiar?  Well who should turn up at the very bookstore after seeing his book advertised around town?  Yes, Céline!  Glorious.

The movie revolves around their more grown up, somewhat jaded by life experiences, conversation for the whole movie yet again. Its complex & heart breaking, raw & beautiful.  It is the very last day of Jesse's book tour & he must catch a plane back to America at sunset. So they spend the day together.  Timing is everything.... Ohhhh weep, sob!!!

In Before Sunrise, they meet and they love, all flowery, all brand new experience. In Before Sunset, they meet and they flirt, playing with forbidden love because Jesse is married, admitting their long lasting love to each other. It’s heartbreaking yet sexy in the same time. Before Midnight is one hundred and eighty degrees different. It will complete their understanding about love.

In Before Midnight, Jesse apparently has more advantage in experiencing love in-and-out of a marriage, while Celine is still connecting love to romance, something that she admits in the luncheon as going down after they have the twins. What this movie wants to highlight is that love comes as an acceptance to both sides – the brilliant and the miserable – of life with your partner, especially the miserable. In the course of nine years for Celine and Jesse, romance has gone, sex  is overrated,  and each of them is growing to become somebody they’ve never expected. Feelings spared, sacrifices made, fightings unavoided, and yet they still want to share life with each other. If it’s not love, then what is?

If you stick around through the closing credits of Before Midnight, the latest film in the trilogy, you’ll see that the movie is dedicated to someone whose name even the most die-hard fans have never heard before: Amy Lehrhaupt. Almost 25 years ago, Lehrhaupt met a young man named Richard Linklater and spent a night with him that he never forgot. Their encounter inspired Linklater to conceive and direct Before Sunrise, the first film in the series. She never saw it, though; unbeknownst to Linklater, by the time that movie came out, Lehrhaupt was dead.

Linklater met Lehrhaupt in fall 1989, when he was visiting his sister in Philadelphia. He was 29 and had just finished shooting Slacker, and was staying there for one night while passing through on the way home from New York. Lehrhaupt was several years younger, about 20. They met in a toy shop, and ended up spending the whole night together, “from midnight until six in the morning,” “walking around, flirting, doing things you would never do now.” As in Before Sunrise, most of what they did was talk, “about art, science, film, the gamut.” Did they kiss? Yes. Did they have sex?....we will never know

But as the night came to an end, the paths of Linklater and Lehrhaupt began to diverge from the fictional storyline of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy).  The real-life young lovers exchanged numbers and tried to keep in touch while they were away. They called each other a few times, but it was “that long distance thing” that did them in

Linklater didn’t know then that Lehrhaupt had died in a motorcycle accident on May 9, 1994, before she reached her 25th birthday. Before Sunrise started filming a few weeks later. Linklater only learned of her death three years ago, when a friend of Lehrhaupt’s, who knew about the encounter, put it together and sent him a letter. “It was very sad,

I had a similar story meeting a girl who was applying for a job here...long...long time ago. We spend the whole night and morning together. She did get the job....but the day before moving to New York...she found out she had cancer and died 6 months later. Till this day...I still remember that night.