Richard Linklater has a thing for time. He likes to watch it with the fascination of a microbiologist examining a petri dish. He notices worlds within an instant, the layers of the past, the present and the future, the collision of the ephemeral with the infinite. As the world recovers from Boyhood, a film he shot over a 12-year span, maybe it is time to recall when he first compressed time and examined its relationship with human lives. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are two masterpieces that he filmed with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawk nine years apart. He then waited for another nine years to bring the same actors together in Before Midnight, a 2013 film that brings the journey of the earlier two films to some kind a culmination though with Linklater you really never know. The story of the first came from the memories of a fleeting encounter with a woman who he never reconnected with and who died much before the film was released. So perhaps there was a sense of something unfinished that followed him through the making of the first two films.
It has been 20 years since Before Sunrise released and it still remains everything that you want life to be. Serendipitous, unpredictable, magical and full of promise. Released in the same year as DDLJ, a far more simplistic meet cute moment on a train hurtling across Europe, Before Sunrise was where we first met Jesse (Ethan Hawk) and Celine (Julie Delpy), two young strangers who connect initially over their mutual scorn for a middle-aged couple’s voluble bickering in a Vienna bound train. And then begins a conversation that is as thrilling as a new city that somehow feels as familiar as a well-loved street that you revisit in your dreams and know what to look for and where. This connection is not an elemental one but the kind where two people rediscover each other after a long goodbye.
The conversations are like toy boxes with hidden flaps and sudden springs that constantly take them and us by surprise.They decide to spend a night walking the streets of Vienna and talk about their lives, the world, old memories, hopes and through it all, you can see they are measuring each other, seeking and finding signposts to a mysterious place called love.
We are taken into the very core of an inexhaustible fascination between two strangers who really are cut from the same cloth. But are they really? Or is that when we have a limited amount of time to give to an experience, we idealise it to an impossible degree?
From Hum Tum to London Paris New York, Bollywood has tried to rip off the idea of a charmed interlude leading to a momentous shift in individual destinies but never without failing spectacularly. Who in our cinema can after all match the cerebral yet natural dialogues written by Kim Krizan and Linklater in synergy with Hawk and Delpi? The lovers are given another chance to reconnect in Before Sunset while Before Midnight shows what happens to love when it is no longer a long, unhurried conversation but real life where children must be raised, chores divided, exhaustion with each other negotiated. Celine is now frumpier, heavier and a jaded mother of twins who mimics the vapid, beautiful women who throw themselves at her novelist husband but is deeply anguished by how little fulfilment she has found in a marriage with a romanticised soulmate while Jesse is free to chase his dreams as a writer.
Jesse is baffled by the woman who is no longer the free spirit he fell in love with and who nitpicks, nags, cannot stand his bathroom habits and the fact that he travels far more than she does. Who perhaps suspects that he no longer looks at her like the elusive dream she once was when he was married to another woman. She is now that woman, she fears, who could not keep him. And yet through all the ugliness that mars their Greek holiday, they remain compulsive talkers who cannot stop bickering, joking, being sarcastic, being gentle, being tired and yet somehow finding enough energy to start all over again.
Though they know things about each other they would never have suspected from afar, even they don’t know perhaps that as long as they have the need to share, something, anything, what they have cannot die. Before Midnight winds up like Before Sunrise and Before Sunset did. With an unfinished conversation hanging in the air. A conversation that like Celine and Jesse’s love can never end conclusively.
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