Who could have guessed at the impact of such a casual encounter? In Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), Jesse, an idealist young American travelling through Europe, tries to persuade Celine, a French woman he has just met, to spend the day with him in Vienna. Crucial to his line of reasoning is the idea of regret: what if they let this moment go and spend the rest of their lives wondering, well, “what if?” So Jesse asks Celine to imagine a point in the future, ten or twenty years down the line, when life is no longer filled with the promise of youth: “Think of this as time travel”, he tells her, “from then till now.” What might this potentially life-changing encounter, this interruption of the quotidian, mean to them as they approached middle age?
It’s a good question, and one that Linklater and his actors, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, have attempted to answer on two further occasions: Before Sunset picked up Celine and Jesse’s story nine years later, while the third film in the series, Before Midnight, is scheduled for release in June of this year. With almost another decade since elapsed, Jesse’s remark—“Think of this as time travel”—now takes on an even deeper resonance—and not only for the film’s protagonists.
Not that we could have known—my wife and I—that a film we watched on a Saturday night, in April, 1995, would end up serving as a marker in our own lives. How could we? Back then, we were still ten years off being married. Not only that, but I doubt the filmmakers themselves had at that point conceived of returning to their fictional creations. Besides, Before Sunrise was not the kind of film that spawned sequels, and certainly not in the mid-1990s: studio-backed but “personal” and “independent”; episodic rather than plot-driven; and with long, languorous takes—it lived out of a backpack, as it were. But from the start it had the one special effect intrinsic to cinema itself: the concept of time. Which makes it make it sound “heavy” for a Saturday night at the movies, though it was anything but.
In those (pre-congestion zone) days, we thought nothing of driving into the West End to see a movie. And on the following Monday morning, when I returned to my job as a video buyer for HMV…Well, there you go: perhaps you can see what I’m getting at: video, HMV—how much has already gone to the wall. Or as Celine tells Jesse (in Before Sunset): “It’s about that moment in time that’s forever gone.”
Of course, it was only with the arrival of the second film that Linklater revealed the hand that had been there all along. It took Before Sunset for me to see it. The actors had noticeably aged, especially Hawke, who looked as though the interim years had not been kind: the boyishness was gone, and when Jesse spoke of a marriage failing and of the love he felt for his son, it was as though Hawke was speaking, or at least writing, from experience. (Hawke is a co-writer on the film, along with Delpy and Linklater.) The euphoria and sense of possibility that the first film engendered had been replaced by a feeling of disappointment that is Chekhovian in its lament for lost time and unrealized dreams.
Photo: Steve Rooney
By the time Before Sunset came out (2004), I was working in cinema exhibition—cinema management, film programming and projection—and on at least three occasions screened the films in a double bill. So I could see how each film deepened and enriched the other. But even to write these words is to realize how much has changed in such a short span of time. The idea of a “double bill” is almost a thing of the past. Since the release of Before Sunset, the cinema I manage has undergone both a name-change and, like many cinemas, its own technological revolution: films nowadays are rarely screened on 35mm prints. When Before Midnight is finally released in June, it will almost certainly be digitally projected, with reels replaced by a DCP (digital content package). And where is the romance—the loveliness—in that? But that is where we are: things change, losses accrue. We go on.
Photo: Matt Whitehead
In 2005 my wife moved to New York (for work), while I remained in London, which seemed—on the surface, anyway—a Jesse and Celine type predicament. In reality, it meant I made numerous trips to New York, eventually moving there in the summer of 2007. I spent a year walking the streets, exploring the canyon avenues (my own version of a long and languorous take). I went to the movies, subscribed to American magazines, looked after our old cat, and enjoyed a different kind of existence. A friend asked if I was “re-inventing myself”. I told him no, but I knew what he meant: I was exploring the “what if” of my own life.
In his review of Before Sunrise, The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane pointed out that Linklater had “managed to pull us back into that wordy, pleasantly confused moment of youth when people have the nerve—the pretension, maybe, but also the wit—to envisage their lives as a kind of literature, to imagine themselves sauntering gaily, or grimly, through one short story or another.” I’ve never gone that far, though I certainly understand the impulse: the need to lose oneself, if only for an extended moment, in something other than reality: be it a movie, a three-minute pop song, or, in my case, books. In New York, I spent an awful lot of time in second-hand bookshops, incorporating them into my daily routine, making my rounds like a doctor visiting his ailing patients: Skyline Books, East 12th Street Books—both now gone. But the Strand Book Store is still there and I feel about The Strand the way E.B. White felt about New York: “If it were to go, all would go—this city, this mischievous and marvellous monument which not to look upon would be like death.” That is the kind of literary reference that Jesse would have reached for 18 years ago, as the sun came up in Vienna. Back then, Jesse quoted Auden—As I Walked Out One Evening—but the sentiment is the same: time and mortality are the enemies.
I must have gone to the Strand at least once a week for an entire year, not always with the intention of buying something. Accounting for my hours-at-a-time absence, I referred to it as being “lost-in-Strand time”. (I like to think that Linklater and his time-travellers might approve of such a concept.) But then I recalled—belatedly and after repeated viewings of Before Sunset—that Celine had once lived at 11th & Broadway, one block down from The Strand. (She gives Jesse this information in the back of a car, in one of the series’ most heart-breaking moments.) Surely it was within the realm of possibilities—within fiction’s remit—that they’d come close to meeting each other here on previous occasions. (Jesse looks like a Strand kind-of-guy.) Or perhaps they’d even picked up the same book, seconds apart? Or is that crazy? Is that just me, running away with the possibilities of “what if”? But one has only to look at some of the great writing the films have inspired to see I’m not alone in imagining a life (or several lives) for Celine and Jesse away from the screen. After seeing Before Sunrise, film critic Robin Wood wrote that “…the longing for permanence is so powerful that one would love to see a sequel (Celine and Jesse Go Boating perhaps) in which they did keep the appointment, returned together to…France? America?…and tried to work out ways in which ‘commitment’ is still feasible.” Wood died in 2009, though his questions and insights are remarkably prescient: 18 years later, it looks as though they’re still trying to work it all out. Which is to say: is commitment ever feasible?
So perhaps you can see why this most casual of trilogies might exert a grip on its original audience. And why, from time to time, we like to check in on Celine and Jesse, with the corollary being: we’re checking in on ourselves. These films walk beside us, so to speak, echoing our concerns, while enacting and enjoying a flaneur’s privileges: walking, talking, dreaming—or “just bullshitting”. Is it any wonder that, if you are a certain age and of a similar disposition, Linklater’s films occupy so much head space? Or to put it another way: walking life as Waking Life.
In May 2008, as my year in New York was coming to its visa-imposed end—as London and “real-time” beckoned (and Celine hates “real-time”, though Before Sunset revels in it)—I stepped out of yet another bookshop, this time in Chelsea: 192 Books. As I walked up 10th Avenue I recognised a man in his late thirties; he was with his son. It was Ethan Hawke, or Jesse if you are given to speculating about fictional characters. He looked well, which made me think that Celine was back in his life. At that point, I had no idea if another film was in the works; there were only rumours of a reunion. But here we are in 2013 and I’m not sure what to expect.
—Mick McAloon
Running From The Reels 