Julie and Ethan go to places – parts I and II

BEFORE SUNRISE [1995], BEFORE SUNSET [2004]

Richard Linklater’s two-parter, but now it’s a trilogy because of ‘Before Midnight’. Plot – 1995: They meet on train, he’s American, she’s French, they spend a day together in Vienna, talk a lot, promise to meet up again. Plot – 2004: Nine years later, turns out they never met up when they said they would, they lost each other, settled down with other people, he wrote a book about that day in Vienna, she reads it and comes to the shop in Paris where he’s talking about the book that he’s selling in the bookshop he’s in in Paris, they spend the next couple of hours walking about, talk a lot, has one of the best endings to anything.

shows all the classic hits

It’s pretty tough getting five weeks holiday in the summer. What you non-teachers don’t understand is that some of our friends are you, and you lot are quite likely to have a job which gives out fewer weeks off than that across the entire year. So imagine the horror of getting up in the middle of some beautiful August morning, eating a couple of breakfasts, watching YouTube clips for a bit, having another little sleep, taking a relaxed poo, and then around midday beginning to wonder what everyone else is doing. A few texts are sent out, and they come back with the reply that, actually, nobody can do anything because they’re all at work. What the fuck kind of response is that? This is almost as annoying as getting a bank holiday Monday in half term and realising it doesn’t mean you’re going to get an extra day off the following week. Surely I’m owed that by society. Surely I am.

Some time in 2004 I had a day out in Cambridge, thinking I’d get to hang around with C while I was there, because that’s where his job was. Turns out he can’t just walk out the building because someone he knows is round the corner. Admittedly, I can’t do that in my job either, but what I’m trying to make you all understand is *I* was in Cambridge, so it’s not asking too much for the city to stop what it’s doing and put its entertainment pants on. In the end, we arranged to meet about six o’clock, which is practically bedtime. What was I going to do with all those Cambridge-bound daylight hours? I droopily walked down the road and saw the posters outside the arts cinema.

There was a double bill of ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Before Sunset’, which I’d only ever watched at home, starting right then, and ending when I needed them to end. Sometimes the Form of Beauty enters my life, and this was one of those times. I went back a few months later when they did it all over again, and, more recently, the Prince Charles Cinema in London ran its own back-to-back screening. Their decision for doing this must be connected to the just-released ‘Before Midnight’, which I’ll write about when I’ve seen it.

Despite me loving these films more than most of the real people I’ve ever met, I don’t know how much I’d recommend either of them. Mark Kermode put out this video some weeks ago, asking people if they’d ever watched a film where they felt, because of cultural differences, that they just didn’t ‘get it’, or if they had seen one they thought others wouldn’t get because they were from a too-different culture themselves. His main reference was ‘I’m so Excited’, which he thought was just that too much Spanish in its references and context for an English audience to pick up on all it has to offer.

At first, all I could think of for me was ‘Annie Hall’. It was on TV when I was 14, and it was my first Woody Allen film. I enjoyed it well enough, but I remember precociously thinking I was too young to fully appreciate it, and I would come back to his work another time. Eventually I did, and it was worth the wait. My cultural capital enhanced, I got it much better the second go.

And then there was that time I watched ‘La Haine’ with H, which I’d already seen a load of times. A French-speaking ex-Parisian, she found it far funnier than I’d ever done, laughing at almost every line spoken by Sayid, who apparently was a very recognisable ‘type’ from the city. Just not recognisable to me.

double bills i want to see

This may not directly address Mark Kermode’s request, these being more time and age-related points than cultural ones, but I’d put forward ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Before Sunset’. Watching the first one back in ’95, here was an appealing couple a few years older than me, talking about the kinds of things people like that talk about, and feeling the same feels people like that feel. I thought I was just entering a similar mental space to them, and it was wonderful to be in their company for a while and care about what happened to them.

Looking at ‘Before Sunrise’ in 2013, it’s like finding something I’d written as a teenager, and noticing the shortcomings I hadn’t recognised at the time. Their chat on more metaphysical questions is overly fluffy, paddling pool philosophy, and there’s a few scenes which can legitimately be met with the response ‘Pffft, hipster bullshit’. To be fair, the unrelated Richard Linklater film ‘Waking Life’, which had Julie and Ethan playing different characters and again chatting about wanky supernatural stuff was much worse. I’ve put very little effort into finding that particular clip, but I did uncover this bit in his other rotoscoping animation ‘A Scanner Darkly’, where Robert Downey Jr. finds a bike with an uncertain number of gears. It’s much better.

When ‘Before Sunset’ arrived, I saw it as someone nine years older, watching people from my past who’d also grown nine years, so it felt like we’d aged together. To an extent, I’m excited to one day look back on it the same way I do now with ‘Before Sunrise’. Perhaps I will once I’ve seen ‘Before Midnight’, one replacing the other.

‘Before Sunset’ carries a lot of dramatic weight by itself, but I doubt it would have the same effect on someone who wasn’t there when its predecessor emerged, or at that right kind of age. If you hadn’t been with these characters when they first met, the nine years later kind-of payoff in the second film may not hit home in the same manner. A major theme of ‘Before Sunset’, that life can just get in the way of the things you want the most, surely can’t register as heavily if you watched them today for the first time. And me making such a ‘You weren’t around at the beginning’ claim rightly leads to a ‘Pffft, hipster bullshit’ dismissal far more than for anything Richard Linklater’s put on the screen.

This theme of the effects of time passing gets enhanced by a number of other elements across both films. In ‘Before Sunrise’, Julie Delpy finds the gravestone of a 13-year-old girl who killed herself, which she says she first saw when she was the same age. Standing in front of it again, she notes that she is older, but this dead girl is still thirteen. Talking about his intended follow-up book in ‘Before Sunset’, Ethan Hawke outlines a plot where a married man looks at his free-spirited young daughter dancing on the kitchen table, suddenly seeing in her the characteristics of her mother, his wife, taking him back to the early days of their relationship which were more open with possibilities. And once he meets up with Julie again, their conversation gets increasingly dominated by their contemplating the years they’ve missed together, with all the emotions rising to the surface in the little time they have left to spend with each other.

But as I said, what really seals ‘Before Sunset’ is the last scene. The first time I saw it, I remember seeing the final shot, and everything slowed down as I thought, ‘Is this the end? Are they going to finish it here? They did? They did! They have! That’s fucking amazing! Fucking fuck yes!’

Because of that, I’m cautious about ‘Before Midnight’. Sticking on another film, even if it’s really good, is sadly going to turn that end shot into something else. And someone coming across it now wouldn’t be viewing it as a finale, but as the middle of a trilogy, which wouldn’t be the same.

There’s so, so much more, but I’d rather stop now knowing I’ve barely started, than attempt to be comprehensive and fail in trying. So, to respond to Mark Kermode’s question as well as I can, here are a couple of films which I don’t think everyone is going to get, if they saw them now rather than in 1995 and then 2004. Not as brilliantly as I do, anyway. While if I meet someone who says ‘Ginger Snaps Unleashed’ is shit, I’ll just think they’re a wanker, I’m far more understanding if they don’t appreciate these. But I’ll also be muttering, ‘You weren’t there, man. You weren’t there’. Like a twat.