Hello. How do you do? Can I sleep with you?

Rating: Null/10 (17 November 2004)

Richard Linklater is obsessed with strangers. He wants to connect with strangers. Is it some kind of coincidence they all happen to be female and attractive? In fact, this exact same theme is re-visited in Waking Life, a more creative Linklater production made after Before Sunrise. In one Waking Life scene, the protagonist walked past a stranger, their eyes met for a fleeting moment and then walked away. He, perhaps overcome by her attractiveness, ran back to her, and uttered these spontaneous musings: "I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant, like some living thing going through life on ant autopilot, with nothing really human required of us. I want to see you. I want you to see me." And the girl actually goes, "Yeah! Me too!". Ahh...if only flirtation can be so easy.....
What Linklater has done so successfully in Before Sunrise is to package a simple boy-girl romance story, sprinkle lots of random philosophical musings, and actually manages to churn out a romance full of bittersweet and wistfulness. The idea of this spontaneous combustion of two souls in the vast solitude of the universe is a beautiful idea. It could very well have worked but for some reasons.....
What didn't work for me was how Jesse kept gushing about how he felt this connectedness with Celine. Any full-blooded male would, what with her quirky French accent, her pale white skin, her sensitive blue eyes and her ravishing blonde locks. The scene in the music booth seemed contrived. It was as if Linklater already had this idea and decided to do Before Sunrise just to accommodate this little game of darting nervous eyes. And the people all seemed so friendly and accommodating. Poetry-spouting beggar, honour-serving bartender.. who else are there in dear old Vienna? Lastly, while I won't condemn the script as pseudo-intellectual crap, I just can't help that there is this overwhelming physical attraction between Jesse and Celine which relegates the attraction of the minds to a secondary level.
I just wonder that if this were a ghost story, a story of two faceless discarnates without the earthly bound of the human body, would the same combustion have happened?
Rating : 6.9