I fell in love again.

Rating: Null/10 (29 August 2004)

There are certain times (increasingly) when I seem to be the only person in a cinema audience who 'gets' the film we're watching. Who loves it to bits and wants to rush out at the end and paint five stars next to the title on the hoarding outside. It's a phenomena I can trace back to Wayne's World when Robert Patrick in full T-1000 mode pulls Mike Myers over, holds up a photo and asks him "Have you seen this boy?" Stoney faces all round apart from laughing my BCG scar off. It happened again at the end of Richard Linklater's new film Before Sunset. Everyone else offers a collective "Huh?" and I'm applauding and subsequently dancing out of the screen. It's the perfect ending to a frankly perfect film.
In the first movie Before Sunrise Jesse and Celine met randomly on a train in Vienna and decided to spend the night together. They were obviously in love, but deciding that their relative situations were too complicated they didn't swap details but promised to meet again six months later. In the sequel Before Sunset they bump into each other again in Paris and they again talk about how they're feeling about each other and this time what happened before. The little piece in the brochure at the cinema were I saw it advised that you didn't need to see the first film to enjoy this one. Hogwash. It's not that this film doesn't make any sense - it does - it's just without seeing what happened to them in Vienna, emotionally this simply doesn't have the same resonances - you needed to be there with them, because it's as much about your memories of what happened them as theirs. So if you can, get a copy of Sunrise if you haven't seen it already then go for this. It's important.
And now I'm in the utterly horrible position of trying to review it. The problem is that its 80 minutes of two people walking around talking. So anything I say about what I like or dislike will ruin some aspect of it. I've avoided other writer's opinions for months because I suspected this would be the case and going back to them having the 'been there', I'm glad I did. Most of them enthuse, enthuse about what they've seen but in doing so whole swathes of the surprises that are in there spirit away. Don't look here for a detailed synopsis because you're not going to get one. And whatever you do don't read anyone elses.
On a technical level though, it's amazing. Given the real time nature of the story you might expect Linklater, who has already had some experience working with digital video (see Tape) to follow the path of Mike Figgis in Timecode and record everything in one take or whatnot. Instead everything is in celluloid, just like the first film, but it all flows together beautifully - even though its mostly been photographed on single or two camera setups, it feels as though the characters walked around Paris and the film cameras just happened to be there at the right time (in fact I think principal photography took about nine or ten days). It's also a testament then to Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, both highly underrated actors, that their performances also ebb and flow correctly and with great emotional precision. It feels improvised, but apparently every word was scripted by the director and these two actors, opening up some of the themes about autobiography which are apparent at times. But I'll talk about that when the dvd has comes out and I'm happy that enough of you have seen it.
What more can I say? I don't feel like I've said nearly enough to convince you to go find a showing, so tell you about the circumstances of how I saw the film. Since I realized it had been made, it's about the only film I've wanted to see this year (so I suppose the odds on me liking it were stacked in its favour). I assumed that on the first week of release it would turn up at the local Picturehouse @ FACT because its just the sort of thing they would carry amongst the more intelligent blockbusters, indies and international cinema (they had Neil LeBute's The Shape of Things for example). I checked their website last night and nothing. I looked at the cinemas across Liverpool and then Merseyside and it isn't on anywhere. So I went to Manchester tonight instead and saw it at The Cornerhouse. A whole other city, straight after work. Its 45 minutes each way by train so effectively I spent more time getting to and from the cinema than it took to watch the film. You know what? It was absolutely worth it. I fell in love again.