“so in the morning, we turn back into pumpkins, right?”
Written: Jun 16 '03 (Updated Jun 16 '03)
Product Rating:
Pros: A simple, obvious, but brilliant romance-plot premise, whose actors have chemisty, charisma, and wit.
Cons: You're watching people talk for 90 minutes, without you getting a word in edgewise.
The Bottom Line: Have you ever condensed _your_ 15-hour conversations into a movie-length best-of? Me neither. I doubt ours look near as pretty on film.
The videocassette cover of Before Sunrise could easily be mistaken for that of a Harlequin romance novel. Ethan Hawke and a barely-recognizable Julie Delphy are groomed and gauzed til they’re gone with the next breeze, and a bizarre smaller pic at the bottom of the cover has Hawke in suit and tie, his facial hair trimmed to the Type A aggressiveness of a glorified pirate, bending over and dipping an anonymously 19th-century debutante dancer. Meanwhile, in the actual movie, Celine (Delphy’s character) briefly warns Jesse (Hawke’s) of her opinion of the classic Penthouse Forum scenario where boy meets beautiful French girl, boy has sex with her, boy never has to deal with her ever again. It is an oddity of Before Sunrise that, in trying to play to three fantasies – those of the male-porn audience, the female-porn audience (for what else is Harlequin?), and the I’m-so-cool-I-know-who-Richard-Linklater-is audience – it mostly only managed to reach the last and smallest. Linklater is also the director of the appealingly strange and nonjudgmental Slacker and the tense, claustrophobic Tape, and I happen to think he is a brilliant student of human interaction and conversation: which is what Before Sunrise is, a movie-length condensation of one 15-hour-or-so conversation, precisely observed and honest and funny. But quite frankly, if you want the Harlequin story, it’s here too (without the godawful costumes); and if you want the no-obligations conquest, you at least get 90% of the movie to wait and see if that’ll happen. Maybe it does, don't get all discouraged on me. Before Sunrise, to me, was a contender that shoulda been a winner.
The short form of the premise is so simple I wonder why it was new: “Let’s make a movie out of a first date” (tried later in purer form by What Happened Was, a movie whose two characters are sufficiently strange as to allow lots of non-redundant future use of the form). However, to add a more linear dramatic tension, there’s a catch: it’s the movie of a first date that takes place with no likely possibility of a second date. Jesse is a handsomely dissheveled American college student ending a traditional two-week train tour of Europe, hating the tourist sites but claiming happiness at the chance to catch up with his own thoughts on the rides. Two middle-aged Germans, probably a married couple, are sitting a few rows in front of him, arguing fiercely for the movie’s first two minutes as you wonder whether you accidentally set the movie to dub everything into Deutsch. Celine is a beautiful French girl, also at the end of her travels, who flees the German couple and sits down across from Jesse, who naturally decides to talk with her. They continue their conversation in the snack bar, but alas, they’re getting off in different locations, so that’s that. It’s a 15-minute movie, and how often do you get to enjoy one of those?
Wait – nope. Nevermind. It’s early evening, and Jesse doesn’t have to fly back to America until 9:30 the next morning, and he senses that they’re really hitting it off; so he asks her to get off in Vienna with him and keep him company. He can’t afford a hotel, so he’s just going to wander the city all night. What’s to lose? She agrees, and they wander the city getting more and more attracted, trying to figure out what to do with these emotions. It’s even trickier once Jesse reveals that, if long-distance relationships actually worked, he’d’ve spent the whole two weeks in Madrid with the fellow American (on a year’s foreign study) whom he’d had reason to believe, until he showed up, was his girlfriend. Such knowledge imposes a troubling honesty, though not the sort that renders a first kiss on a ferris wheel any less sappily romantic.
************
Part of the appeal of Before Sunrise is the playful intelligence of the conversation. Jesse and Celine are bright liberal-arts college types, aware of the human mind as a vastly complicated toy, and just as aware that the human body is a simpler (but equally fun) toy dragged along in its shadow. It’s no accident or surprise that when Jesse starts a game of truth-or-truth (“We can ask each other any question we like, and the other person has to answer it honestly; I’ll start”), his first question is “Tell me about the first time you felt sexual feelings”. It’s amusing and revealing, but still not surprising, when Celine answers in detail, asks her own question (“Have you ever been in love”), and gets Jesse’s answer: “… Yes. I have. Okay! My turn to ask something now!”. But even as men and women and love and lust are discussed, bits of bookish speculation work their way in (all paraphrases subject to poor memory):
Jesse: “If you had an island of 100 people, and there was one man and 99 women, you could have, at the end of the year, 99 babies. But see, if you had one woman and 99 men, the most you could have at the end of the year is one baby”.
Celine: “I think, if you had one man, the women would get sick of him and be rid of him. And if you had one woman, pretty soon they’d all kill each other over the woman. You’d wind up with, like, 43 men.”
Jesse: “Yeah. It seems to me that in certain circumstances, women are okay with the destruction of men. Like, there was this girl I was dating once, and we were walking along, and this group of four big, thuggish-looking guys drives by and calls to her “Hey! Nice tits!”. And I’m cool with this, I don’t need to be possessive or defensive about it—“
Celine: “Plus there’s four of them.”
Jesse: “Right! But my girlfriend turns around and says “F--- you, dickheads!”. Now, if they come after us, we both know it’s not _her_ they’ll be beating the crap out of.”
*************
Of course, conversations have less lofty functions, like Jesse defusing Celine’s mockery early on: “You think I’m this boorish Ugly American who only speaks English, but _I tried_, darn it. I studied my French, I walked up to the rail station in France practicing the French phrases I need, and I got to the front and stood there. I couldn't remember one word of French. Finally, “Uh... can I buy a ticket?”.
Another part of the movie’s appeal is that, despite first impressions of who talks first and who asks whom to get off the train, Jesse and Celine are absolute equals. The initiative is taken as often, and as cleverly and entertainingly, by her as by him. Linklater has the insight to recognize how often even what looks like male initiative is actually female initiative. I recall a camera-intensive field study of singles bars in the 1970s, where the husband-wife researcher team determined that the overwhelming decision factor, for a man deciding whom to start talking to, was which women angled themselves and their smiles in the man’s direction. Put in movie terms, Celine didn’t have to get away from the fighting couple, or could have gotten away to a different seat. And that was just her passive mode.
A more surprising related feature is the movie’s investigation of the art of the deal: not in the Donald Trump big-business sense, but the way people size each other up and negotiate even in friendly contexts. A palm reader wanders by and prices her services to Celine as “for you, 50” – perhaps that’s always her price, but it’s much more likely that, for a palm reader, palm-reading is a less useful skill than deciding what your service will be worth to your audience. A homeless student by the river asks “Not for a handout, but for a word. You give me a word, and I will write you a poem containing that word, and then you pay me whatever you think that poem is worth. Do we have a deal?”. The very nature of the before-sunrise date requires all sorts of negotiation between Jesse and Celine. Most of it is shadowboxed and light-hearted, and a darned useful survey of how to keep disagreements that way it is (though it kind of depends of you and your deal partner being mutually infatuated). But as the dawn proceeds, more and more of the negotiation needs to be explicit.
The movie is also beautiful, shot with extraordinarily warm colors and pretty scenery. I mean, it’s just a bunch of shots of Vienna and of trains, but they’re great shots.
A fifth strength of the movie is the ending (which I’m not about to reveal). When Harlequin and Penthouse fantasies are both running hog-wild, along with the sheer collegiate appeal of an interesting guy and an interesting gal who really like talking to each other, and there’s an obnoxious deadline handed down by fate or irony or an indie screenwriter with a grandiose gimmick, there are a huge lot – a plethora, in Howard Cosell terms – of different ways the ending can be false, bludgeoning, pat; and at least one way the movie can avoid all of those with a predictable cop-out that ignores some of the very lessons the characters bring to their meeting. Before Sunrise, in my opinion, uses the characters’ native ingenuity and Europe-wandering adventuresomeness to cleverly avoid all the traps. (My bad-novel experience might be far too limited to see where he stole it from, but in that case, I’d hope yours is too.)
And in one more virtue I haven’t yet mentioned, Richard Linklater invokes Steinberg’s Law: “If at all possible, involve a cow”. A brown cow? I won’t tell you how, now. It ought to be entirely surplus to the pleasures of staring at Julie Delphy as she attempts to imitate a telephone answering machine, or of waiting for a great work of poetry to be scribbled out using the word “milkshake”, or of watching Ethan Hawke pick pointless fights about other people and be laughed off and wishing “I wish _I_ was cute enough to get away with that” – then realizing he doesn’t get away with it, entirely. But if the cow is what you need, there is one. Sort of. You’ll see what I mean. Ok?
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