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Preliminary notes on Before Sunrise






The Little Space in Between

By Robin Wood

 

...You know, if theres any kind of god, it wouldnt be in any of us, not you, or me, but just...this little space in between. If theres any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, its almost impossible to succeed, but who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt...

Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise

 

I knew, the first time I saw Before Sunrise, that here was a film for which I felt not only interest or admiration but love; a film I would want to revisit repeatedly over the years; one that would join the short list of films that remain constant favourites; and one that I would ultimately want to write about, as a means at once of exploring it more systematically and of sharing my delight in it with othersof finding that magic in the attempt. I believe in the possibility of a definitive reading of a work only in the sense that it is definitive for myself at a certain stage of my evolution, that it defines not the work but my own temporary sense of it, the degree of contact I have been able to achieve, as clearly and completely as I can; but I do not feel ready, with Before Sunrise, for even that limited and provisional undertaking. What follows, then, should be read as a series of loosely interconnected and often tentative probes, the beginning of a work in progress: a preliminary attempt to define why, for me personally, this film belongs among the dozen or so that exemplify cinema at its finest.

 

STYLE

 

Style is a necessary word whose meaning we all think we understand until we try to give it a precise definition; indeed, like many necessary words, it may be useful only so long as its meaning remains somewhat vague. If we restrict it to camera-style we can handle it fairly confidently, talking about long-shots or close-ups, static or moving camera, high angle or low angle, long takes or rapid editing. Yet this is never sufficient, and such an analysis, however meticulous, may become actually misleading, as well as a way of privileging some styles of filmmaking over others. It might, for example, lead one to the conclusion that the films of Leo McCarey had no style at all, or at best a style lacking all distinctiveness and distinction, whereas its great distinctiveness (McCarey at his best is always instantly recognizable) arises not from the use of the camera but from the relationship between the director and his actors. With Linklater one can indicate certain specific stylistic preferencesthe fondness, for example, for long takes, both with and without camera-movementbut this will not take one very far in defining the feel of the films, ones experience in watching them, to which style is obviously crucial. In this wider sense (ultimately the only valid one), style will always elude precise definition. Nor is the old style/content dichotomy very helpful. It works only if one reduces content to something like a plot synopsis or the action as one might narrate it to a friend: the content of a film is images and sounds, and the specific nature of those images and sounds is style. To talk of the two as somehow distinct and separable is impossible, and the moment one begins to talk about style as something with an autonomous existence one also begins to misrepresent the film. This is true even of the work of directors who developed an instantly recognizable visual style, who are commonly seen as great stylists. To take two obvious extremes (both of whom might, I think, have had an indirect influence on Before Sunrise), the visual styles of Ozu and Ophuls are inextricably a part of the meaning of their films; andunless, again, we define content as plot synopsisthe content of a film is its total meaning, which can never be finally fixed (it will change subtly for each generation, as cultural change brings new perceptions). This is not to assert that style must express content in the sense familiar from traditional aesthetics. It would be more accurate to say that style is the artists means of defining the relationship of the spectator to the film. Aside from the realist (i.e. illusionist) styles of most mainstream cinema (and those already embrace a very wide range of possibilities), there are the Brechtian styles (another wide range, as the term has been applied to everything from Sirk to Godard) and the various styles of melodrama. But they too are inextricable components of a films meaning, its content in the wider sense.

 

LEVELS OF MEANING

 

A. The cover of the laserdisc of Before Sunrise gives (somewhat unusually) fascinating and useful information about the films conception and creation. One can distinguish various stages in its progress from idea to realization.

 

i. Richard Linklater, in New York for a work-in-progress screening of Slacker, decides to visit relatives in Philadelphia; he meets a woman in a toy store, and they spend the night wandering the streets, talking.

 

ii. Some years later (after completing Slacker and shooting Dazed and Confused) he sees this experience as the possible basis for a film.

 

iii. Feeling the need of a womans input (I didnt want the woman in the film to be a projection of myself), he enlists Kim Krizan (whom he had met when she auditioned for Slacker) as fellow screenwriter; together they compose scenes in which he provides the mans dialogue, she the womans, but with some interchange (he wrote some of her dialogue, she some of his).

 

iv. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are cast as the two leads, and there follows a series of consultations in which they also contribute ideas, often drawing on personal experience (Hawke: It was like mutual group therapy, a great way to begin; and Linklater: The fake phone call scene came from something Julie did with her girlfriends as a teenager...I thought it was brilliant, so we just worked out the scene from there...)

 

v. Filming begins, but the screenplay still leaves space for interpretation, improvisation, accident (e.g., the two actors in the play about a cow really were two actors in a play about a cow... Hawke: There were a lot of scenes like that.)

 

The laserdisc cover fails to maintain this level of interest and intelligence to the end (quoting Glamour Magazine, informing us that Before Sunrise is The most winning romance since Four Weddings and a Funeral, and apparently not grasping that this is an insult). But such first-hand documentation of a films creation is all too rare; so often, we critics have to rely on interviews with directors discussing films they made ten or twenty years earlier, memories of which are inevitably partial, and coloured by distance, bias and exaggeration. Just one crucial step is missing: Why Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy? How were they cast? Were other actors considered, approached, rejected? I ask because, given the result, it is absolutely impossible to imagine the film without Hawke and Delpy (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman? Or, really to scrape the bottom of the barrel, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore?). It is clear, not merely from the account of its making but from the result, that Hawke and Delpy made themselves integral to the collaborative creative act: Have any two actors ever given themselves more completely, more generously, more nakedly, to a film? The usual distinction between being and acting is totally collapsed. Before Sunrise is both, and indissolubly, a Richard Linklater Film (no one else could have made it) and a densely collaborative one. It would be an ideal subject for one of those Special Edition laserdiscs where, on an alternative audio track, the filmmakers and actors give a running commentary on the film as we watch; one hopes that some enterprising executive will organize this before the film recedes too far into the past.

 

This gives us three levels of reading: Is this a film about Jesse and Cé line (characters), Hawke and Delpy (actors) or Linklater and Krizan (filmmakers)? The levels are there, but they merge into each other to the extent of being ultimately undistinguishable from one another. The style (and also the meaning) of the film is not merely Linklaters decisions as to where to place and when to move the camera; it is also Hawkes precise gestures, Delpys precise expressions, their intimate interaction: hence ultimately unanalysable on paper.

 

B. Although it is not very useful, it seems necessary to say that the meaning of a great film is ultimately itself: the movement from shot to shot, the precise sequence of sounds and images. Victor Perkins has demonstrated that the meaning of The Wizard of Oz is not reducible to There is no place like home; on a higher level of achievement, one must not reduce Tokyo Story to Life is disappointing, isnt it? , or that favourite refuge of western critics mono no aware, and For me, life is movement does not sum up Lola Montes, let alone Ophuls in toto. Such explicit statements have their place in the fabric of a films total meaning, but only as a contributing factor within a context that may qualify or even contradict them. I shall not, therefore, attempt to find a phrase to sum up the meaning of Before Sunrise, but I shall venture to suggest that its meaning develops simultaneously on three continuously interactive levels:

 

i. Personal: the detailed description of a highly specific relationship between two complexly characterized individuals.

 

ii. Social: the exploration of contemporary (post-60s/70s feminism) attitudes to love, relationships and romanticism.

 

iii. Metaphysical: the pervasive preoccupation with death, time and transience, chance and arbitrariness, a world without any sense of certitude or confidence in the future.

 

AFTER THE END

 

We know of course (having been told so many times) that characters in a fiction have no existence beyond it, and it is therefore improper to speculate about their lives outside it. But Before Sunrise seems to defy such a prohibition: everyone with whom I have watched it immediately raises the question of whether or not Jesse and Cé line will keep their six-months-ahead date. The general consensus is that they probably wont, a conclusion one might find supported by both the melancholy andante of Bachs first viola da gamba sonata that accompanies the penultimate sequence, and the song that accompanies the end credits, with its refrain Hold me like a lover should/Although tomorrow dont look so good, and its celebration of living light: there are simply too many of those mundane obstacles, too many highly unromantic practical questions (about money, work, travel, distance, where to live...) that seem trivial before sunrise but will begin to loom very large after it, as time passes. (So far I have found only one dissenter, but a very intelligent one: Lori Spring, filmmaker, teacher of screenwriting and member of the original CineAction collective, who told me that she never had the least doubt that the date would be kept). That the six-months date inevitably evokes An Affair to Remember doesnt really help, beyond reminding us that happy endings are no longer as generically guaranteed as they used to be. But the verdict is always reached with great reluctance, testifying to the continuing pull, despite all the battering it has received, of the romantic ideal as a powerful and seductive component of our ideology of love and sexuality. I think this responsethe realistic acknowledgement of uncertainty, precariousness, the transience of feelings, the recognition that amor doesnt always vincit omnia, qualified by a romantic yearning for commitment, stability, permanencecorresponds very closely to the films overall tone or feel, accounting for the resonance it has for contemporary audiences (with more confident marketing, it could have been a runaway hit).

 

There is a third alternative: that one will and the other wont. My initial reaction was that, if that were the case, the one who did would be Jesse. I though this might be the product of some lingering trace of sexist prejudicethe fickleness of women and all thatbut its tenability was subsequently confirmed by one of my female students, who came up, quite unprompted, with the same conclusion and offered the same justification: that he is the more romantic, she the more realistic. And indeed, if such idle speculation has any interest, it resides in the possibility that it throws some light on the films personal level, the level of individual character. I found myself commenting earlier on Ethan Hawkes gestures and Julie Delpys expressions. Obviously, the distinction isnt absolute; but Jesse habitually acts things out, as if constantly anxious to convey what he meansor thinks he means, or wants to meanhe cant simply be sincere but must continually demonstrate his sincerity. Of the two characters he seems the more insecure, the more vulnerable, the less mature. Cé linemore educated, more aware, more intellectual, though not necessarily more intelligentis far more at ease with herself, more stable, hence less demonstrative. There is no absolute opposition: the more times one sees the film the more complex the characters appear, both revealing certain basic uncertainties, anxieties about life and death, and by the end of the film she has shown a vulnerability that corresponds to his. But the initial impression, though much less confident, lingers. The intensity with which she clings to him in their final embrace before she boards her train, the expression of near-desperation on her face which he cant see but we can, suggest both that initially she will be the one who suffers the more and that she already has no real hope of a future with him; her intellectual awareness will help her to cope. One imagines him, back in America, obsessively developing (and insulating himself within) a romantic fantasy which he half knows to be unrealistic, while she continues to meet people, look outside herself, form other relations. (On the other hand he has his buddies, not to mention his dog!). And if he is at the station on the appointed date, a part of him will even take a certain masochistic satisfaction in his disappointment; she, meanwhile, will be smiling quietly to herself at the memory of a magical night, with pleasure, tenderness and a passing regret, and will wonder where he is and what has happened to him before going on with her own life.

 

I have changed my mind many times as to whether to include the above conjectures or cut them, partly because I am uncertain as to whether they have any critical validity, partly because every time I see the film I become less confident of their validity even as interpretation. If I finally decide to leave them, it will be because the very fact that I surrender to such temptations indicates something very specific and very important about the way the film works. It is characterized by a complete openness within a closed and perfect classical form (an unquestioned diegetic world, the unities preserved, the end symmetrically answering the beginning). The relationship shifts and fluctuates, every viewing revealing new aspects, further nuances, like turning a kaleidoscope, so the meaning shifts and fluctuates also. No two individuals will respond in quite the same way, or in the same different ways on a second, third or fourth viewing. Ethan Hawkes reference to group therapy has implications far beyond the first stages of discussion among filmmakers and actors, it extends to the audience, involves each individual spectator in a complex dialogue: Do you feel this, do you agree with that, how exactly does this affect you, your attitude to life, your ideas about relationships, the relationship you are in, the relationship you want; or do you really want a relationship at all? The questions the film raises are never answered, the uncertainties it expresses are never closed off. But in any case, the tug of the longing for permanence is so powerful that one would love to see a sequel (Cé line 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.

 

However, the question of Will they or wont they? may be a simple (and sentimental) evasion of the real question posed by the films ending, which is far more radical and disturbing: Would it be better if they did or if they didnt?

 

POINTS OF REFERENCE

 

Through its intimate and detailed treatment of its central couple, the film explores the possibility of meaningful or successful relationships today (in the aftermath of 60s/70s feminism, with its profound effect on male/female relations which the 80s/90s backlash has been unable to eradicate): a possibility at once longed for and called into question. The film provides three reference points or touchstones, constructing a backdrop against which the problematic of contemporary relating can stand illuminated. One is dramatized within the fiction, the other two are extra-diegetic.

 

THE QUARRELING GERMAN COUPLE ON THE TRAIN

 

I take it that, like Cé line and Jesse, we are not expected to understand what the argument is about (money is mentioned), but we get the impression that the mutual and bitter animosity is habitual, perhaps that it is one of those petty squabbles that often substitute for discussions of the real marital tensions that cannot be spoken. The couple are directly linked to Cé line and Jesse, as the fight is inadvertently responsible for their first meeting: Cé line changes her seat to get further away from their noise (she is trying to read), taking a seat across the aisle from Jesse; she and Jesse first make eye contact as the couple stride angrily past them down the aisle, and exchange deprecating smiles to acknowledge their shared awareness; they first make verbal contact when he asks her if she has any idea what they were arguing about; and their relationship may be said properly to begin with Cé lines Have you heard that as couples get older, they lose their ability to hear each other? . We are also shown, in a brief single shot, an elderly couple, silent, who perhaps have reached a stage of resignation and stagnation beyond bitchy arguments and who might be taken as representing what the fighting couple will become if they remain together. This is the immediate context within which the beginning of a new attempt at relating is placed; a marvellously succinct and unobtrusive statement of the films thematic starting-point.

 

DIDO AND AENEAS, LISA AND STEFAN

 

The overture to Purcells mini-opera accompanies the opening credits, the tragedy-laden introduction over the white-on-black main titles, the allegro neatly synchronized with the first images, shot from the rapidly moving train, its final chord coinciding with the appearance of the directors credit. And, for any filmlover in the audience, the Viennese setting, the visit to the Prater, the complex examination (however different in spirit and conclusion) of romantic love, cannot fail to evoke Letter from an Unknown Woman. Both these reference points view romantic love as variously doomed and tragic, and in both the woman is at once the emotional centre/identification-figure and the prime sufferer, but there the parallel ends: the Queen of Carthage, abandoned by Aeneas, dying apparently of a broken heart (though possibly, following tradition and anticipating Berlioz, she commits suicide, the stage direction offering only the sparse and enigmatic Dies); the woman who has grown up, starved of power and the experience of beauty, in a petit bourgeois milieu in late nineteenth century Vienna, and wastes her life in selfless (or selfish?) commitment to the potentially great concert pianist whose life is wasted already, in the impossible quest for vicarious fulfilment. These were surely intended (and if they werent they should have been) as indicators of past attitudes to romantic love, and as such they cover, altogether, a remarkable time-span: Virgil, Troy, Carthage and Italy (to found which is Aeneas divinely ordained destiny and his reason or pretext for abandoning Dido); Purcells late seventeenth century England; Vienna, about 1900; Hollywood, about 1947; and Vienna, 1995. [This is the first time a Linklater movie has evoked a past more distant than that of his horror film Dazed and Confused, and these are not the only references to it. There is the pervasive presence of Vienna, its architecture, its history; Cé lines mini-lecture on Seurat (I love the way the people seem to be dissolving into the background, a description that might apply, less literally, to Before Sunrise, with its consistent concern with time and place and its repeated reminders of other human lives being livedthe actors, the fortune-teller, the poet, the people in the restaurant), and the films most purely magical moment where the couple, at dawn, on their way for Cé line to catch her train and, they believe, about to say their last farewell, become suddenly aware of the sound of a harpsichord emerging from a basement apartment, where a very early riser is playing Bachs Goldberg variations].

 

It is these reference points that imply the question I raised, implying (one might say) a signpost to an unknown destination. If a relationship must lead either to the tragic waste and desolation offered by past concepts of romantic love or to the stagnation and bitterness into which so many contemporary marriages seem to degenerate, would it not be better if Jesse and Cé line were left at least with indelible memories of one magical night? The films challenge is to define the unknown destination: if we want them to form a relationship (as surely we do), then it must be of a quite different order from anything offered by the familiar models. This is surely why the outcome becomes so important to us: not although but because it is so concretely realized and particularizedand certainly because the film convinces us so thoroughly of its potential valueit raises very acutely and precisely the fundamental questions for every spectator today: how do we relate? how should we relate? how might we relate?

 

In this context, comparison with Letter from an Unknown Woman seems especially suggestive, the films extreme stylistic differences corresponding to an equally extreme difference in the depiction of romantic love. Both directors are obviously fond of long takes, but of a diametrically opposed nature: Ophuls long-takes-with-camera-movement are obviously choreographed trajectories guiding the characters from here to here, suggesting some form of predestination or entrapment (whether we interpret it in metaphysical or social terms seems a matter of personal bias, as both can find support within the film). Linklaterstypically with a static camera, or with movement that is clearly determined by the movement of the actors rather than vice versaleave the actors free, permitting spontaneity. That romantic love in Ophuls is viewed as inevitably tragic is always traceable to the subordinate position of women (with whom he plainly identifies) in patriarchal culture: in Letter, romantic fantasy is Lisas only escape-route from the ignominy and constriction of her social position. The lovers of Before Sunrise, on the contrary, meet and negotiate on a level of equality: it is difficult to see that Jesse enjoys privileges that are closed to Cé line.

 

That the film, however one reads the ending, always seems so inspirational and life-giving is surely because, within a cultural situation that often seems incorrigibly and fathomlessly discouraging, it reminds us that there have been advances, and important ones, however minor they may appear amid the current right-wing devastation.

 

A NOTE ON THE METAPHYSICAL LEVEL

 

It may at first seem paradoxical (but is in fact absolutely logical) that a film so committed to life should be so pervaded by references to death. Death is, after all, the supreme test of ones sense of meaning. The couples intimacy begins to blossom under deaths shadow, when (in the lounge car of the train) Jesse describes his childhood experience of seeing his great-grandmother, just deceased, in the rainbow formed in the spray of a garden sprinkler, concludes by deciding that death is just as ambiguous as everything else, and Cé line confides that she is afraid of death twenty-four hours in every day. Throughout the film, references to death counterpoint the continuous awareness of the passing of time (the few hours before they have to separate, the past centuries the film evokes). Jesses sudden recognition, at dawn, that they are back in real time is immediately juxtaposed with their awareness of the sound of the harpsichord, and shortly followed by his imitation of Dylan Thomass recording of an Auden poem about the impossibility of evading the passing of time, which leads in turn to their abrupt and frantic decision to meet again, just as Cé lines train is about to leave. These intimations of mortality confer upon the relationshiphowever it is resolvedits beauty and importance.

 

IDENTIFICATION

 

Like style, identification is a necessary word whose usefulness diminishes in direct ratio to the rigidity of its definition; when it is reduced to counting POV shots (or simply to the male gaze) the usefulness is somewhere around point zero. I have tried to address at some length the complex possibilities of identification (degrees of sympathy, split identification, conflicts of identification at different levels simultaneously, etc.) in the Ingrid Bergman chapter of Hitchocks Films Revisited, and shall not repeat the full argument here (it has not, so far as I know, been refuted, just ignored, as is usually the case with arguments the current critical hegemony finds inconvenient). It will suffice to say that I use the term to cover the entire spectrum, from our sharing the experience of the entire action with a single character (who would have to be the audiences magnet of sympathy and present in every scene, a possibility that remains in the realm of the hypothetical), to the flickering and fleeting play of sympathetic attaction shifting from character to character. With the former extreme one thinks of Hitchcock, but in his films such total identification is invariably either brutally shattered or subtly undermined: by the abrupt demise of our identification-figure (Psycho), by his sudden withdrawal from a crucial scene that reveals what he doesnt yet know (Vertigo), or by the systematic erosion of confidence in the acceptability of his behaviour (Rear Window). The latter extreme is also uncommon, but Renoir is its most obvious practitioner in, for example, La Grande Illusion and La Regle du Jeu. 1

 

From first scene to last, Before Sunrise systematically and rigorously resists encouraging identification with one character above or against the other (and its difficult to think of any other film that achieves quite this feat). Do men automatically identify with the male, women with the female? I doubt it, although our gender may of course entail a certain bias which the film goes out of its way to undermine: some men, some women, perhaps, but only those so fanatically devoted to the rights of their own sex that they are insensitive to the films style, the structure of its shots and its scenario, the marvellously achieved equality of its two central performances.

 

WATCHING AND LISTENING

 

When we talk casually of reading a film, most of us usually mean reading between the lines or below the surface, in order to extricate and explicate its meaning, or at least its thematic complex. One does this, of course, with Before Sunrise, but the film demands more, a reading in a more literal sense: we must watch and listen simultaneously, with the most careful attention to every gesture, expression and word, because meaning, here, refuses reduction to theme.

 

I have to confess, at this point, to a failure: even on first viewing I told myself that I would one day analyze in detail the scene in the listening booth of the record store, in which nothing happens except that Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy either do or dont look at each other, their eyes never quite meeting. After a dozen viewings I abandoned the project. I suppose one might try an elaborate system of charts and timings, annotating direction of the gaze, when and how long each looks (or doesnt)...which would demonstrate nothing of the least importance. With no camera-movement, no editing, no movement within the frame except for the slight movements of the actors heads, nothing on the soundtrack but a not-very-distinguished song that may vaguely suggest what is going on in the characters minds and seems sometimes to motivate their looks (Though Im not impossible to touch/I have never wanted you so much/Come here), the shot seems to me a model of pure cinema in ways Hitchcock never dreamed of (not merely photographs of people talking, but photographs of them not talking), precisely because it completely resists analysis, defies verbal description. All one can say is that it is the cinemas most perfect depiction, in just over one minute of real time, at once concrete and intangible, of two people beginning to realize that they are falling in love.

 

I shall content myself, then, with two scenes that, without at all lacking the essentials of pure cinema, the obligation of the spectator to watch and listen, offer themselves for some kind of clumsy verbalizing: the Question and Answer game on the streetcar, the imaginary telephone conversations in the restaurant. The scenes answer each other (within this meticulously structured film which manages to look as if it was made up as they went along) in a complex pattern of similarity and difference: both are games, played by the two characters as a means toward mutual understanding through play, occurring at different stages in the relationships development, the first essentially a mapping-out of differences, the second a means of discovering each others feelings and confessing their own, implicitly with a view to a possible future (Are you going to see him again? /I dont know. We havent talked about that yetfollowed by a silence); Jesse initiates, and partly controls, the first game, Cé line the second. And the scenes are paired formally by a strict stylistic opposition: the films longest single take (just over five minutes) answered by its most heavily edited sequence (forty-three shots in just over five minutes).

 

Q & A

 

The interplay of gesture and expression throughout the long uninterrupted two-shot is so dense and intricate that one really needs to watch it three times (as one can do without difficulty on the laserdisc as it is contained within a single chapter): once watching Hawke, a second time watching Delpy, a third time trying to see them both together. Otherwise, ones eyes dart constantly from one side of the frame to the other and one misses many of the nuances.

 

Gesture and expression are of course meaningless unless one is listening simultaneously and with equal attention to the dialogue, which defines certain important differences that in turn contribute to defining this little space in between. Cé line describes her first sexual feelings in terms of a romantic crush on a famous swimmer she actually met, Jesse his (after evading her real question, Have you ever been in love? we learn later that he came to Europe to meet a woman and they have just broken up) in relation to Miss July, 1978, in Playboy. The answers to, respectively, Jesses What pisses you off? and Cé lines Whats your problem? are even more revealing. Her answers show a wide-ranging and enquiring (if embryonic) awareness of practical realities: social (I hate being told by strange men in the street to smile, to make them feel better about their boring lives); political (a war going on 300 kilometres from here and nobody knows what to do or gives a shit); socio-political (the media are trying to control minds and ...its very subtle but its a new from of fascism really); sexual-political (I hate being told, especially in America, Oh, youre so French, youre so cute, each time I wear black, or lose my temper, or say anything about anything). His answer, on the other hand, while it also reveals an enquiring, thinking mind, is more abstract, philosophical-metaphysical: he speaks of reincarnation and eternal souls, and the ensuing conundrum of the increase in world population: 50, 000 years ago not even one million, 10, 000 years ago two million. Now five to six billion. Where do the souls all come froma 5, 000-to-one split. So is this why were so scattered, so specialized? (While marginally more rationalif one accepts its premisethis recalls Linklaters own hilarious monologue in the taxi at the beginning of Slacker).

 

THE IMAGINARY PHONE CALLS

 

The forty-three shot sequence perfectly exemplifies that fundamental principle of western (and other?) art, almost (but not quite) perfect symmetry. It is introduced, punctuated around the midpoint, and closed, by three identical two-shots of the couple opposite each other at the restaurant table; Cé lines imaginary call has twenty-eight shots, filmed in strict shot/reverse-shot form; Jesses has twenty-two, filmed similarly. To clarify:

 

Shot 1: Two-shot: the couple

 

Shots 2-29: Shot/reverse-shot (Cé lines call)

 

Shot 30: Two-shot: the couple

 

Shots 31-42: Shot/reverse-shot (Jesses call)

 

Shot 43: Two-shot: the couple

 

The restaurant scene follows the scene in the street at night that concludes with Cé lines speech quoted at the head of this article, the last words provoking a lengthy silence and a cut to long-shot as they continue sitting on the bench; it is introduced (before the imaginary phone calls) by a series of shots of other customers: a mixed group at one table, two men playing cards, two bearded men conversing, a woman alone reading a book, an American couple (the man grumbling about the service), two men and one woman, laughing at a joke...other lives, other relationships, other problems. Cé lines speech, and the other customers, create a context (both of lives and of ideas) for the couples exploration (through the game) of each others feelings and expectations, testing the possibility of a continuing relationship. I feel disinclined to dissect this wonderful sequence in detail. I would describe it as one of the films high points, were it not for the fact that it doesnt have any low ones. The use of play as a medium for revealing truths and emotions that one cant quite dare speak seriously is touching in itself, in its implications of vulnerability, the desire to speak out inhibited by the fear of being hurt, the suspension at the endJesses question (in the role of Cé lines confidante) Are you going to see him again? remains unansweredanticipating the similar suspension in which the spectator is left at the end of the film.

 

FINAL

 

Perhaps the films moment of greatest tenderness occurs after the lovers have separated: the sequence of shots (accompanied on the soundtrack by Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach) re-viewing the places they visited as the new day begins, some with the first stirrings of activity, some still deserted, an old woman glancing disapprovingly at the empty wine bottle they discarded in the park where they made love. The sequence evokes the ending of Antonionis LEclisse, but without its sense of desolation and finality: rather, the feeling is of sadness and happiness inextricably intermingled, regret for the separation and the uncertainty but a deep satisfaction in the degree of mutual understanding and intimacy two human beings have achieved in a few hours, how nearly successful the attempt to bridge this little space in between. And, as Cé line says, the answer, the magic, must be in the attempt. The same might be said of the critics relationship to the films s/he loves.

 

 

 

1 There may be a direct connection between Renoir and Linklaterthere is certainly common ground, in the emotional generosity, the range of sympathy, the attitude that manages the difficult feat of being critical without being judgemental. I think particularly of Slacker. Renoir once said that the film hes always wanted to make but could never set up was one in which we would follow one set of characters for a little while, then others would walk by or appear in the background and we would leave the first set and follow the newcomers, who would shortly give way to yet others, and so on throughout the film. Slacker may be Linklaters realization (though very much on his own terms) of the film Renoir never made.

 


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