Woman found, lost, then recovered – Before Sunset

I suppose I’ve strung this out long enough. It’s time to bring on the happy ending for this thread.
Sequels are generally disasters artistically, and usually obey the Hollywood principle that if you flog a winning horse long enough, at some point you’ll have to accept it’s dead. Before Sunset is not like this. To say it is as good as Before Sunrise is beside the point. It simply completes that story, and gives it another dimension, that of mature reflection and hard-won acquiescence to the demands of romance. They fully earn their happy ending.

Taken together Sunrise-Sunset let’s us have our cake and eat it too. It just takes 9 years to finish the meal. Sunrise ended with the mature artistic ambivalence about a happy ending. Did they meet up again 6 months later, was the spark still there? How bold, reckless, trusting, or perhaps cynically knowing not to exchange phone numbers or even surnames. The filmmaker was as mature and discerning as the characters were reckless. It’s a beautiful but complex gesture. And it could resonate for the duration of the 9 year hiatus, occasionally surfacing as an unresolved question. A bit like the ‘what might have been’ Jesse evokes as the argument for his impetuous suggestion. Get off the train, or you will never know…

We didn’t know for quite a while. In between life, messy, disorganised life intervened. How was it for us? How many trips on the Ferris wheel of love? How many fallings down to earth? We grow old, we grow old. All of us, viewers and characters alike. We cannot conquer Time.

Time is again the principal theme of Sunset. The ‘before’ indicates that the clock is ticking, with another plane to catch (or not). And sunset, the cinematic shorthand for a happy ending is what they are up against. Will the plane fly West from Paris in pursuit of it, or will they make their sun stand still, and redeem Time? Real time this time. From the first scene at Shakespeare & Company where Jesse is reading from his novel about that one night in Vienna, through their walk and boat trip through Paris, and the endlessly deferred deadline of making that plane, the film intensifies the tension by playing out in real time. A plane to catch, a real-life anxiety we can all share, is but another turn of the screw. This is one plane we are happy to miss.

Not quite the first scene. Cleverly, the film’s opening pays homage to its progenitor. Sunrise ended by revisiting the locations the couple had populated that evening, now empty, and forlorn without their chatter and life. Sunset starts by viewing the empty scenes that will be populated in the film that follows. It underlines the emptiness of the lives Jesse and Celine have been living. Cold, dead years, devoid of romance.

Celine visits the bookshop where Jesse is reading from his novel about that night, and the frozen time starts to melt. Slowly. They have reversed roles. She is more cynical than the dreamy girl of 9 years before. Jesse’s book is ‘very Romantic’, I don’t usually like that’. He assures her that his fictionalised account that had brought their romance up to date originally had a different ending. The couple (them) had originally met up as arranged, spent a few days together and realise there’s nothing there. ‘I prefer that. It’s much more realistic’. But his editor made him change it. ‘Everyone wants to believe in love. It sells’. How true. And so they draw us in, our desires shadowing them round Paris.

So what really happened? He turned up. she didn’t. Her grandmother died, and the funeral was that day. She had no way of contacting him. A tragic irony worthy of Hardy. But it meant Jesse wrote a book, maybe to make sense of it all. If he hadn’t Celine would never have found him again. He wrote her back into his life, and now they can re-write the past. Celine has had a string of relationships, but is happier alone. Jesse is married, with a child, yet his life is devoid of love. It’s quite clear ‘romance’ happened back then, and only then. They have never got over that what might have been.

Another walk through a European city, another re-connection. Not just any city. Paris in late summer. They go to a cafe. They take a river trip – usually for tourists – as the sun slowly sets. In other words, they take a trip on the Tunnel of clichéd Love, and yet still they resist. Or pretend too. ‘Maybe we are only good at brief encounters in European cities’. How will they ever know?

You're going to miss that plane. There’s still time he protests. Time for one last cup of tea at her place - a Boho Parisian appartment to die for - and for Celine to sing one of her own songs. Just a little waltz (which comes from Vienna, of course). ‘I just want another night, another try’, the song ends. And with it the film. "Baby, you ARE going to miss that plane".... "I know." And so the sun sets slowly, fading out to the strains of Nina Simone. He’s not going to board that plane. But the war is over now, sacrifices are no longer demanded for a greater good. They can always have their Paris. Happy ever after (we can hope). They earned it.

(Please Mr Linklater, leave it be there. Don’t revisit it, up-date it, worry over how they are doing. Please don’t feel the urge to pick the scab. It is quite, quite perfect. Let them grow old and happy together beyond the silver screen. Give hope to the hopeless.)

Woman recovered, then given away - We’ll always have Paris

Of course I need to delay completing my post on Before Sunrise / Sunset (after all, Linklater took 9 years to complete the romance between Jesse and Celine, so I have plenty of scope), which would take us to Paris. So I thought I’d ponder on a classic variation on this regret-renunciation-remembrance = romance thread: Casablanca.

Too obvious? Forgive me, but I’m just back from Morocco (albeit Essaouira), where I went to escape the horror of Christmas, and to restore the true meaning of the festival with a bit of sun worship. And while I was there I read Tahir Shah’s book The Caliph’s House, about his adventures living in the city where the film is supposedly set. He relates encountering a mad American who travels the world watching the film everywhere it is playing, and who declares it the greatest film ever made. Many would agree, as it still tops the favourite film ratings, suggesting it still has the power to stir us 65 years after it was made.

I think this is down to the way it combines the archetypal with the historical and topical. The classic love-triangle is as old as romance itself (as Lancelot and Guinevere at least), but is enriched by the war-time conflict between personal desire and patriotic duty. And as time goes by (sorry), that period itself, and certainly its setting in what was once the Art Deco jewel of French North Africa, have acquired their own Romantic veneer as an epoch to sigh after. Who wouldn’t wish to walk into that particular gin joint, swathed in stark film noir ambiance, and hear the tinkle of that piano, just about to play that song? Memory, melancholy, a certain melody, borders, crossroads, danger, the exotic orient - the film is a veritable tagine of Romance, spiced with all its essential ingredients. OK, on the ‘oriental’ side it may be, as Tahir Shah points out, a farrago of Hollywood fantasy of old Arabia, whereas ‘the Casablanca of the time was European from top to toe’. But I’m dealing with romance here, not reality, and exaggeration and fantasy are the life blood of this concept, and add to the film’s enduring appeal.

I’m not going to just witter on about the film, or about orientalism and Romance, as I’m qualified to do neither. I’m interested in that line, ‘We’ll always have Paris’ muttered while an engine roars in anticipation of departure. This brings us to the next leg of our journey started by faint-hearted Hardy not getting off that train. ‘We’ll always have Paris”. Always is a tricky concept in the Romance repertoire. This is what Wilde’s Lord Henry has to say about it In Dorian Gray: “Always!. That is a dreadful word. It makes me shudder when I hear it. Women are so fond of using it. They spoil every romance by trying to make it last for ever”. Yet we’re not talking about the happy-ever-after always of clinging anticipation, but of fond recollection. The past is redeemed by Ilsa walking into that gin joint and restoring their memories of Paris.

Here we are again, at the crossroads of Romance, and an engine is already running. Rick reasons that Ilsa should get on that plane along similar lines to Jesse suggesting Celine get off that train - the projected anticipation of regret. But with a difference here. “If that plane leaves the ground and you're not with him, you'll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.” Wise-cracking cynical Americans moulding the destinies of dreamy Europeans are evidently not all alike. There’s a war on, don’t you know, and so personal Romance is commandeered for a Greater Good. The Underground has its hero, Rick has his redemption, and they will Always have their memories. And not just of anywhere - of PARIS no less...

Woman found then lost...

Girls on trains, radiant strangers, the romance of regret? Of course, there are exceptions, and rules (like hearts) are there to be broken.

‘Happy ever after’ is the approved romance ending, but does it spell the end of romance? This is the paradox that delightful diptych ‘Before Sunrise / Sunset’ explores so beautifully and plausibly, making them such devastatingly ‘romantic’ films, when manipulative drivel like ‘Love Actually’, actually is not*

Before Sunrise (1995), Boy meets girl on a train. She (French, shy, dreamy) is continuing on to Paris; he (American, worldly-wise, confident) must get off at Vienna to catch a morning flight back home. They chat, they connect, and as the train pulls into Vienna, he moves into familiar territory: "If I don’t ask you this, it’ll haunt me for the rest of my life". Ah, he’s read the poems, heard the songs. No faint heart in a railway station he, he asks her to leave the train with him, and walk around Vienna for the evening. His reasoning and audacity are faultless:

“Jump ahead 10-20 years from now, you’re married, but it just doesn’t have the energy it once had. … and you start to think about all those guys you've met, and start to wonder what it would’ve been like if you’d picked up with any of them. Well. I’m one of those guys. Think of it as time travel… This could be doing a gigantic favour to you and your future husband, showing you you didn’t miss out on anything. I’m just as much a loser as he is, and you’re really happy”.

This is how it starts, and goes on, somehow managing to be both romantic – impetuous, dreamy, idealistic –; and realistic - cynical, wary and knowing – at the same time. The dialogue (and the film is mostly dialogue), threads a swaying tight rope across the chasm dividing romance and realism, and they walk it engagingly together.

Defying convention, defying genre, it earns the right to romanticism, by being so very honest. One meaning of ‘Romance’, after all, when used as a verb is to fib, or at least to exaggerate. ‘Romancing’ before it was used to rhyme with ‘dancing’ in throwaway pop, meant telling porkies. "Do you know anyone in a happy relationship?" Celine asks. ""yeah, but I think they lie a lot". But, there’s none of that here. Principally because they only have that one night together. Stolen from time – “officially we shouldn’t be here”. So happy every after (the biggest fib of romance), isn’t an option, and is summarily dismissed: “Why do people believe relationships are supposed to last for ever? Yeah it’s stupid”.

And so they fall into romance by resisting it through reason. We’re rational adults, they keep assuring each other, trying to convince themselves of the logic of not attempting to stay in touch. The more honest (ie unromantic) they are, the more they earn the right to what they resist. They rub reality against the debased coinage of romance, against all its clichés and conventions, they rub it so hard it eventually shines through.

But at their back they always hear Time’s winged Chariot (the 9.30 Austria Airlines flight to America) hurrying near. And so they make love, under the stars, and finally make a pact with their cold reasoning. They will not exchange numbers or addresses (not even surnames), so none of that happy-ever-after stuff is even considered. They refused to be hoodwinked by false hope. Instead they will meet in exactly six months. Time, cheated, travelled through, deferred, will have his due. “O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time”. TBC (of course).

*Oh, that ‘actually’, the smug, so-very English embarrassed understatement, qualifying the tawdry, vulgar passionate ‘Love’ and sanitising it into Home Counties idiom: ‘I did go to a public school, quite a famous one, Actually’; ‘Actually, I was hoping to get into TV/publishing/film, and was wondering if you knew of any openings, yes my father was x, I suppose the name gives it away’; ‘I don’t Actually know anything about it, but I’m sure I’ll do a splendid job’…Actually, I am bitter, and I haven’t actually seen Love Actually, but that snivelling caval of posh luvvies is sufficient demerit in my book.