Follow @SketchyReviews

Wednesday 26 June 2013

Overlooked Gem of the Week: 'Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight'


The Before films are hard to pitch. I know so because I've lost the last two hours of my life trying to work out how to do it. Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) walk mile after mile through beautiful European cities and talk of everything and anything. At least when the West Wing did 'the walk and talk' the characters were discussing how to fix the world because it was their job to fix the world; plus they walked really REALLY fast. In Before Sunrise (film number one) the pair talk about fixing the world because they're young, naive, and a tiny bit pretentious. They also don't walk fast. Theirs is a leisurely walk. Up until now, to get friends and family to watch the films, I've had to do sit them down one by one, in-front of them. At which point they're hooked. The easy conversation, the humour, the chemistry, are such that you wish you were with the pair in Vienna, Paris and the Greek peninsula.

Before Midnight (film number three) was released last week, so I'm using that as an excuse to try and talk (/write) anyone and everyone into seeing them so that I can stop inviting people to my house to watch them. (I'm a misanthrope at heart.)

Before Sunrise was a slight film, but an easy one to love. Celine and Jesse meet on a train and disembark in Vienna, where they spend the night walking around the city and getting to know each other. They talk about themselves, their aspirations, and most everything else covered under the fairly expansive: life, the universe and everything. Which sounds like it'd be trying - yet it's not. The characters are so well drawn that they reel you in. (This becomes truer with each film, as Hawke and Delpy were co-writers on both the sequels, and added parts of their own lives to their characters history.) The film ends on an ambiguous note; it's up to the viewer to decide whether they ever meet again. The optimists and romantics believe they do, the realists are unsure but want to believe it'll work out, and the pessimists believe that distance and circumstance will be more than enough to keep them apart. Each film ends in similar fashion, leaving the viewer to decide whether the pair will make it.

Filmed and set nine years later, Before Sunset is structured just like the first, this time set over a single afternoon spent walking and talking in Paris. To say more about the plot of Sunset or Midnight (set yet another nine years further down the line) would be to give away too much.

The joy of the films is in the minutiae, the way Jesse and Celine talk and maneuver: a loaded question meant to catch the other off-guard, or simply set them up for a lose-lose situation; a minor remark that will come back to haunt them as the meaning gets changed or twisted, or is assumed to carry a passive aggressive charge. When, in the third film, the two characters argue and try to hurt each other it's genuinely affecting.You understand them so well by the last film, and know that they both ultimately want the same thing, but they can't get out of their own way. Midnight certainly has the hardest challenge: the first two films could, for the most part, skip past the realities a couple has to deal with in life; Midnight tackles them head on, and it makes for the most gripping and well realised film of the series. If you like meeting new people, going to new places, chatting about nonsense, you'll like these films. If you don't like any of that... You'll still like these films. In fact take what I've written above, then imagine a group of films that are twice as good as what I've described, as I don't think I know how to do them justice.

Overall:
Before Sunrise - 7.5/10
Before Sunset - 9/10
Before Midnight - 10/10

2 comments:

  1. Nicely put. I recently found out about this trilogy recently from being a fan of Waking Life and watched all 3 in a single day, luckily Before Midnight was still in a theater by me.

    They definitely had a big impact on me, I'm still thinking about the characters. I doubt I could really ever convince a friend to watch them.

    ReplyDelete
  2. They're a tough pitch. That's why I kept having to literally sit people in front of them. Maybe the best thing is to do it Pay It Forward-style: I make six people watch it, they each make another six watch it, then so on and so forth until the world is conquered!

    ReplyDelete