A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, October 17, 2020

Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Sunset
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Vernon Dobtcheff, Louise Lemoine Torrès, Rodolphe Pauly, Mariane Plasteig, Diabolo, Denis Evrard, Albert Delpy, Marie Pillet. Screenplay: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke. Cinematography: Lee Daniel. Production design: Baptiste Glaymann. Film editing: Sandra Adair. 

Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) together again, nine years later. They meet in a Parisian bookstore where Jesse, now a successful novelist, is signing copies of his book, whose story is based on their brief encounter in Vienna nine years earlier. It might have remained that, just a brief encounter with echoes of the great 1945 David Lean film of that name, except that Céline's curiosity tinged with guilt brings her to the book signing, where she hovers on the fringes until she catches Jesse's eye. Like Richard Linklater's 1995 film, Before Sunrise, Jesse's novel ends on an uncertain note: He doesn't say whether the characters he has based on himself and Céline made their appointed rendezvous in Vienna. The people at the book signing urge him to express an opinion on whether they did, but Jesse hedges. And so it remains for Céline herself, who invites him to join her for coffee after the signing, to elicit the truth. She knows she didn't make the planned reunion: Her grandmother, she tells him, died and she was at the funeral when they were supposed to meet. But did he show up? He says no at first, but then confesses the truth: He was there, but with no way for either to contact the other, he only had to assume that she decided it was over. He has married and has a son; she has remained single. And so begins the delicate verbal dance that Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke have scripted for them to perform. They start almost as they did in Before Sunrise: he the brash, open American with the nervous laugh; she the reserved but intrigued Frenchwoman, only faintly condescending to his cultural and linguistic disorientation in a foreign land. And as in the first film, they walk and talk and prod each other into more and more revelations. Like the first film, Before Sunset also has a terminus ad quem that gives their encounter a sense of urgency: He has a plane to catch and a driver to get him to the airport on time. And like the first film, this one ends on an ambiguity: They have gone to her room, where they exchange a bit of dialogue before the credits roll. "Baby, you are gonna miss that plane," she says. "I know," he says. And so we have another sequel to wait for. I know of no other English-language film that so deftly uses dialogue and the chemistry of two actors (who also wrote much of the dialogue) to accomplish its romantic aims while at the same time scoring so many points about the passage of time, the limits of communication, and the significance of sex.  

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