20 ▶ Cultural: Cinema
Before Trilogy – The Romance Revisited Jan Lubaczewski
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tradition of romance in cinema is as old as the medium itself. From Reynaud’s Pauvre Pierrot (1892), through Murnau’s famous Sunrise (1927), to Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), love on the screen has always excited us. It would seem that after over 100 years of movie-making there is not much to be said on the subject. Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy proves the contrary. Its marriage of romantic emotion and genre decomposition makes the films both an experience and a case study. The director analyzes how reality challenges ideas. I would argue that Linklater’s films are precisely about the difference between the world of ideas and the reality. His point of view is in a way a variation on Plato’s theory. The trilogy is also (as most of Linklater’s films, most notably Boyhood) a contemplation on the concept of time. It was never meant to be a trilogy, “it just, somehow, happened”, as Linklater said in one interview. Spontaneity and a sense of complete creative freedom in Linklater’s filmmaking process are what makes him recognizable around the world as one of the truly independent American directors. Although in Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013) he uses the well-known elements of the romance genre, the way in which he does so tells us something about the cinema, the reality, and life in general. ‣ Before Sunrise is a story of Jesse (Ethan
Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) who meet on a train to Paris. Next morning Jesse has to go back to America from Vienna. When he’s about to leave the train, he asks Celine to get off the train with him, which she does, to his, as well as her, surprise. They spend a magical night in Vienna walking and talking and, eventually, falling in love with each other. If the story seems really banal, that’s probably because it is. It is almost too film-like to believe. What makes the film stand out is its structure. The entire film consists of long shots of the main characters’ heated discussions. What is probably the most interesting is that their conversations usually revolve around great ideas. They discuss love, fate, the boredom of everyday life, and death. On the verge of being really pretentious, Linklater creates an interesting dichotomy. It makes the whole trilogy different from all the other film romances – although the characters talk all the time, the most important moments in the films happen when they are silent, in “the spaces in-between”, to quote Celine. Before Sunrise has been criticized for being “wordy”, even though the main focus of the film is a certain redundancy of words. Linklater deconstructs the genre by formulating a paradox – although the plot is veiled by verbiage, the really important moments happen in glimpses and glances out of time, in silence. ‣ During the second film, Before Sunset,
