I got my indiewire message about the Sundance Film Festival in my e-inbox the other day. The lead story was the positive reviews of Richard Linklater's Before Midnight. I'm very excited and eager to watch what I do hope is the final installment of a story that began 18 years ago with Before Sunrise, Linklater's cerebral romance about two twentysomethings spending the day and night in Vienna before returning to their own countries, and continued in 2004's Before Sunset, which picks up the story indeed nine years after their first encounter.
Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is an American traveling abroad, and about to catch a plane home when the train he is on arrives in Vienna. On the train, he meets Celine, a French university student returning west after visiting family, and convinces her to spend the day with him in the city before his flight and her train leave for New York and Paris respectively. When I saw the film on video, a number of years after its release, it got into my skin; the two share a day of intense conversations about life and love, and so much of it reminded me of my college days, staying up all night with friends bullshitting about Important Things -- you know, the usual stuff that sticks with you forever instead of whatever the profs tell you in lectures. The young couple's go-for broke nature is overly romantic, perhaps, but I remember that sense of feeling alive in the moment. While Billy Joel's "Vienna" obviously captures the symbolism of the city as the crossroads of life, I was thinking of that uptempo middle part of the Beatles' "You Never Give Me Your Money": "out of college, money spent...but oh that magic feeling: nowhere to go..." That's where Jesse and Celine are at this point. I couldn't go to sleep after watching them.
Of course, the real world often has a way of dampening the magic, we all know. Nine years later, Linklater and his co-stars worked on the second installment, another remarkable day of conversation (and skillful camera work, I might add). At this point, Jesse has published a novel based on that day/night (thus making us aware of how romanticized the first film was), is married with children. He meets Celine in Paris, and they catch up...but with the years showing, their lives a bit heavier. Hawke especially looks lean and raw; as critics pointed out, he made this film after his work on Training Day, an acclaimed cop drama that earned him an Oscar nod (and its star Denzel Washington the Best Actor Oscar). Where the first film gives a sense of wholeness, the second film consciously ends ambiguously, with Jesse at Celine's apartment, her a bit drunk and dancing to jazz music and he considering the likelihood that he will miss his plane back home.
What I know of Before Midnight mainly comes from the reviews coming out of Sundance; all I'll say here is that the story picks up yet another nine years later, and obviously this relationship has become deeper than when it was first created in Vienna. I'm not simply talking about what their "status" is; I'm talking about how, as forty-somethings, Jesse and Celine are not as full of speculation and wonder as they had been 18 years before. They met then with only the baggage their youths had given them (a few bad romances, the usual crap for kids), but now they carry their lives, encompassing two decades: a means of measuring their leaps of faith with the weight that wisdom can doom. Of course, like most fans of them, I'm rooting for Celine and Jesse. I hope they can figure this stuff out and be happy. Maybe as much for myself as for them: I'm a little older than they are, and they challenge me to reach for deeper meanings in my own life, to reflect on choices made (or avoided).
I also hope this is the last one Linklater, Hawke and Delpy make. I don't think this should be like Michael Apted's documentary series that began with 7Up! and now is up to where those little kids are 54. Plus, I'm waiting for a nice trilogy box set to be released on video!
No comments:
Post a Comment