The difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion, said Oscar Wilde, is that a caprice lasts longer. Richard Linklater’s 1995 movie Before Sunrise was all about a caprice.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy were Jesse and Celine, two good-looking twentysomethings who met on a train and spent the day together in Vienna on a whim that turned into a miraculous romantic adventure. But the lovers didn’t want their passion to peter out banally so they never exchanged numbers (no e-mail addresses in those days), agreeing simply to rendezvous in six months’ time; we left them brooding separately on this promise as the credits rolled.
Did they meet again? Before Sunset gives us the answer, reuniting them after nine years. Jesse is now a famous writer visiting Paris to read from his best-selling novel based on their night of love, and Celine is in the audience. Old feelings are renewed and old wounds obscurely reopened. In each other’s eyes there is delight and shock: they can see what we can see, having ourselves got older with Hawke and Delpy in real time.
Jesse is in fact harder, leaner, warier. The goatee has survived but the puppyish plumpness of his face has been replaced by chiselled planes. The leather jacket and jeans are gone; now it’s a sharp suit and open-necked shirt. Celine makes plenty of jokes about being fatter in those days, but in fact she has changed much less, affecting the same studenty clothes. How much they have changed or not changed in the intervening nine years is the substance of the movie.
Before Sunset retains most of what was engaging about the first movie: it has its gentleness, its romanticism and, most importantly, its idealism. What it has lost is the sense of mystery. The first film showed these two people carving out their own private arena of intimacy, briefly sidestepping the cause-and-effect world of their lives. Linklater’s animated fantasy Waking Life three years ago in fact returned them to this atemporal bubble for a short, single scene in bed. But bringing them back to the here-and-now, and thus solving the mystery of their possible reunion, denudes their relationship of some of its poetry. In 1995 they met weird Linklaterish types all over the place, full of portents and auguries. Now, in the illusionless present, no prophets are necessary.
It’s a very talky film, with lots of unbroken travelling takes as Jesse and Celine meander through the parks and thoroughfares of Paris, generating funny, funky dialogue, which Delpy, Hawke and Linklater have co-written. Their great debate remains the same. Would they have killed their love by staying together? Was their separation an act of existential heroism? Or were they criminally stupid and arrogant to have chanced upon such a precious jewel and then thrown it away?
In Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Linklater has given us two smart and tender films. Perhaps they can be shown as a double-bill (both are quite short) or Before Sunrise can be reissued on DVD pronto so people can catch up before watching this lovely sequel. — Â