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.)

Up-date on Paris

I just thought I’d report back from Romance Central, and confirm whether or no it is still delivering on its brand. I was there principally on business, but had at least 24 hours to survey the territory as the roving reporter of Romance, and have this to report.

Yes. As I suspected, nothing essential has changed in the 4 years I was there last. It’s not just the skyline. That was as pristine in its preservation as I anticipated. And rightly so. There is also a preservation in the way things are done. The tempo and rituals of life that add up to a quintessentially Parisian ‘atmosphere’. A hard-to-define aura that pervades the very stones. Shops in the same places selling the same stuff at the same time of year, unchanged and unchanging since lord knows when. It somehow gives you hope. This nostalgia, heritage appeal, solidly sentimental clinging to the way things are done, gives it a big tick in the Romance box.

Yet, not everything was unchanged, and I didn’t think I’d live to see this. Paris bars are now non-smoking. Incroyable! Not that I find smoking attractive, or romantic. I’ve never smoked, not one single ciggie, and I thank the lord smoking has been banned in the UK. But somehow I don’t feel the same prejudice against it in the Parisian cafes and bars. A cigarette that bears the lipstick’s traces, waved in gesticulation by a sultry be-bobbed and bereted beauty, who looks icily at me through her cigarette smoke across a crowded bar is part of my fantasy picture of the café society I was happy to view from the sidelines. I suppose I’ll have to relegate that one to history now. There they were, mind, puffing and quaffing outside in the freezing cold under heaters like us Brits, so in some ways it’s business as usual. I must, however, put a cross in the Romance box for banning smoking (and this only applies to Paris).

Another thing that had changed, WAS THE BLOODY PRICE OF EVERYTHING. Strawberries were decidedly more than 7 Francs a Kilo. Things, essential things, like food, wine and fancy clobber, have gone up astronomically over the last 5 years as it is. Add to this the positive prostration of the pound against all world currencies (sterling having actually dipped below the euro), and my pleasure of swanning round Paris absorbing Romance was severely diminished. Part of the pleasure of Paris was the indulgence of senses severely chastened at home. The flâneur cedes to the gourmand in the happy hunting grounds of the boulevard bistros; the haunter of cafes will soak that much longer, with 2 or 3 glasses of an afternoon more than would be acceptable or affordable in London, and so experiences that exotic life to the full. No longer. More expensive than London now, I thought twice about flouncing into places I used to haunt with luxuriant impunity before, and spent ages scrutinizing menus before sheepishly melting away. Being here on my own, I just couldn’t justify the indulgence. Romance is a luxury, or at least the illusion of luxury, formally sustained by favourable exchange rates. (Having said this, I was travelling ‘Premium Business Class’ on Eurostar, which, for about £35 more one way, you can lig your way back into luxury. A fully stocked bar at my disposal, and with two hours to wait for my Champagne-soaked journey back to Blighty under the magic tunnel, I stepped back into St Pancras and all was right with the world and my wallet).

Eurostar, whilst not belonging to Paris, has become an essential part of experiencing it (I can’t imagine why anyone would fly there), and even though it is an innovation, just 15 years old, it actually speeds us smoothly back into the never never land of Romance. Eurostar transports this sea-girt culture over the frontiers of possibility into a continent, one connected at the furthest edge with Istanbul. Without the Disney-land pretension of actually taking what’s left of the Orient Express (for those without imagination who want their faux romance served on a silver-plated platter). Someone has actually had the good sense to burrow out of Blighty (without the commandants noticing), and then laid on a high-speed choo choo to take us to exciting lands beyond. Take a Eurostar and experience what is all but dead in the railway network generally, but richly evocative of a golden age of travel. There’s not a whiff of deliberate heritage about The Eurostar brand, but, for we Brits at least, it can't help making us sigh for a vanished age - of speed, luxury, courtesy, service. All that, and French ladies in uniforms serving you Champagne. Big tick in the Romance box as part of the Parisian experience.

Paris was covered in snow while I was there. Pristine, white-glittery fairy tale snow, making it all the more Romantic. Why? Because rare, and special and long-ago. Boy, that place knows how to deliver. And it covers us all the dog turds (one piece of essential Parisian street furniture we might readily relegate to the dustbin; but then the Parisian’s right to let his or her beastly little pooch poop where it likes is a small price to pay for the more favourable anachronisms elsewhere). And so how was it, wandering around Paris, the city for lovers, all on my Jacques Jones? Solitude was not the ideal situation to audit Paris’s brand, I admit. And yet, there kept coming to me unbidden, as a traversed the familiar unchanging cityscape, memories of earlier visitations. Visitations accompanied by the reality of ‘romance’. In other words, the ghosts of rows past. The last time I was in Paris I was in love, and yet it was the setting for the first serious row, or flip out of what turned out to be a very bumpy relationship. The reality is, you can bring a romance to the banks of the Seine, but you can’t make it drink. We didn’t row the whole time we were there, I’m glad to say, but madame was a world class sulker. So many of the scenes I visited were misted by melancholy recollection of this sentiment. By revisiting them I was able to restore them to their former, and future glory. I was accountable only to myself, and where my whim my take me under a perfect blue sky. Notre Dame soared above me, the Tour d’ Eiffel twinkled anew in the sunlight without a twinge of regret. They were wiped clean and ready for the next time, the marvellous maybe of many loves to come. Paris is indeed the city for lovers, even, perhaps especially, when you’re on your own.

We’ll always have Paris II

When Bogey uttered those immortal words, which sealed the doom for his immediate happiness, but ensured the eternal flame of romance’s most iconic (un)happy ever afters, the choice of location was far from arbitrary. Or rather, the fact that it was Paris and not, well… [substitute just about any location] … plays no small part in the potency of his romantic renunciation. Paris, occupied by barbarians, was a precious, fragile treasury of all that was worth fighting for, and returning to in peace time. Paris is always somewhere to return to in peace time, in spring time, in love time. Paris is always always.

This is the first major icon / cliché of romance I’ve attempted to take on, on its own right. I’m not really capable of doing justice to it, as this is a big big question, the surface of which I can only skim here (like the creamy foam on a Café au lait, grazed dreamily a a Boulevard Café). You see, it’s very difficult not to employ clichés when dealing with Paris, and especially so when tackling the whole Paris = romantic platitude. It is perhaps one of the biggest truisms in romance’s repertoire, and one of the most consistent and coherent ideas ever held about a place. Although we have pretty clear ideas about New York, Rome, Tokyo, London, only Paris has a universally agreed adjective attributed to it.

But why, and, more importantly, when? If I had time, and the British Library had been open when I was pondering this question, I might have backed up the following speculations with a bit of substance. I might just do that when I get the chance; but now I’m going to hazard a guess it was between the wars when Paris became officially ‘romantic’. This idea was obviously fully-formed by 1942, but I don’t think was there in the 19th century, and was certainly not there before that. Paris was sexy, racy, daring, naughty before ‘romantic’ became its official descriptor. This might have contributed to and evolved into the later idea, but it had a different association and value at the time. It meant licence and libertarianism to the Anglo-American imagination, stifled by puritan propriety and prohibition. And this was firmly associated with a progressiveness. Paris was a modern city. It had chopped heads off kings, planned its streets on rational lines, and was at the forefront of what we would now quaintly call ‘sexual permissiveness’. Finally, the official style of Paris’s greatest, most iconic moment was self-consciously Nouveau.

New is not romantic. Paris became romantic when the rest of the world underwent its own revolutions and cataclysms, and Paris was looked to to embody and preserve a vanishing or just vanished order. Fortunately for the rest of the world, the conservative, chauvinistic side of the French mentality came to the fore, and decided to deliver on our demands, and manage the Paris brand rigorously by allowing very little change. The periphique stops it sprawling, like London; the French mind rightly resists the incursion of Starbucks et al., and someone in the planning dept at the Hôtel de Ville, has obviously decreed that the river skyline will change over his dead body. I’m pretty much certain that I could stand on the Pont de la Tournelle and look at Notre Dame and beyond tomorrow, and find the view pretty much as I left it exactly four years ago. Which is exactly what I intend to do, as I’m going to Paris on a flying visit, and this is why I’m prompted to prematurely pontificate on this question.

Paris is romantic because it has made the preservation of an epoch, la belle epoch, part of its official identity, and sealed the idea in. And it is this we re-visit, in recollection, and reality. ‘At the age of 37, she realised she’d never ride through Paris, in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair’ ('Ballad of Lucy Jordan') - never really love, in other words. Not like Bogart and Bergman (I’m sure it’s a reference to Casablanca, and the flashbacks to Rick, actually smiley and looking soppy at Ilsa in an open top car). Last Tango in Where? Why not Buenos Aires? As it nearly all takes part in an apartment, truly it could have been anywhere. But then, truly it couldn’t.

Talking of apartments, there is a very stylish French Film called L’Appartement, which I’ve seen about 3 times now, and I still can’t work out exactly what goes on. It’s some kind of tricksy mystery about the exchange of identities between two very saucy and chic brunettes, who are chased all over Paris by a young man. The problem is, I can’t pay attention to the plot, as I’m too busy following two very saucy and chic brunettes all over Paris, and couldn’t give a stuff about the intrigue. The first time I saw it I wandered out of the cinema in a daze, and couldn’t speak for about 10 minutes. I swear, if I’d had my passport with me, I’d have caught the first Eurostar to Paris and joined in the sport. No mater how saucy the ladies, I would not have considered boarding a train so recklessly to anywhere else.*

Eurostar. Now there’s a romantic spot. Forget about that simply absurd statue they’ve erected. Sit there one afternoon in a bar; drink Champagne, and simply watch the trains depart. Sigh, dream, recollect, regret, and have another sip of Champagne, and watch another train. One day, just maybe… with the warm wind in your hair.

* A few years after watching that film, indeed a few months after my Faintheart at Holborn Tube incident nearly 8 years ago, I went to Paris, and met a young lady in a shoe shop. She was working there while a student, and the shoes were rather nice. I bought 2 pairs out of guilt for having spent so long chatting to her, and we spent the next year taking it in turns to commute by Eurostar. And then? Well, I think I have one of the shoes somewhere.

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...