Slim pickings for Greek cinema

At one point, I thought I'd be writing a blog post from Greece to tell you about taking one bus after another (two total) to see One Battle After Another on the island of Crete, where we are concluding our trip. (Specifically, in Stalos, which is just outside Chania, for those of you who know the island.)

But Paul Thomas Anderson's new film plays only twice a day at the so-called Mega Place amusement center in Chania, and both those times are problematic for my schedule. One is at 7:30, which takes me right out of dinner with my family, and the other is at 9:30, which leaves me stumbling out of the cinema at well after midnight, not really knowing if either of the buses needed to take me back to my Air BnB will still be running at that time.

So, I'm forgoing what I hoped would be the third and final theatrical viewing on my six-week holiday. I had hoped to fit in one every two weeks, but I guess I should be glad that I worked out the first two without bending my wife's good will out of shape. I'll probably catch it the day after I get back, this Sunday. 

Instead, let me tell you about a movie I watched with Greek subject matter, which I decided to do a couple nights ago when I couldn't figure out anything else.

I'd tried to watch Before Midnight, whose Greek coastal setting has given me some of my ideas of what Greece might be like when I got here. But it's not on Neflix, and I'm somewhat arbitrarily limiting myself to Netflix on my tablet while I'm gone. I could probably figure out how to fire up Amazon Prime but I just haven't bothered. 

So then I searched for Greek content on the streamer, and I gotta tell you, there ain't much.

Most of what's offered are TV shows. However, Netflix does carry a series of movies in a franchise called Loafing and Camouflage, most of which are from the last decade or so, but the first of which actually came out in 1984. A Greek language movie from 1984? Sure, why not?

The only trouble with that one was: No English subtitles! I could put on Greek subtitles, but they are obviously for the Greek hearing impaired as the dialogue is also in Greek. So that one was over before it even started.

I landed on a movie from 2012 I'd never heard of, despite the presence of three prominent actors: Sebastian Koch, Catherine Deneuve and John Cleese. I assume you know the second two. If you aren't familiar with the first, Koch is the German actor who starred in The Lives of Others and Never Look Back. Turns out he can also speak English, which is indeed the default language of this film, as you might expect with Cleese as a star.

The movie is called God Loves Caviar, which should also indicate that there is a Russian aspect to it. And might suggest, from that title, that it's a comedy, but it is not. A little bit of a bait and switch there.

Koch plays Ioannis Varvakis, a real Greek man who straddled the 18th and 19th centuries and stumbled into a way to preserve caviar, allowing it to be shipped around the world and making him a fortune. There are some slightly whimsical scenes surrounding that comparatively small aspect of the story. For the most part, though, this is a fairly sober film about a man who abandoned a daughter and her mother (not his wife) to travel the world and spent most of that time on the high seas in service of the Russians, though he also returned to fight for Greek independence near the end of his life. Independence from what? Well, I don't remember that part.

It's not a bad movie. But I think I was hoping for a bit more of a comedy, given that part of the bait and switch is that John Cleese's role in it is not a comedy role in the slightest. And it did seem like a fairly minor historical figure on whom to base an entire biopic.

What did I tell you about slim pickings for Greek cinema? 

Attainable movie dreams

When I use the word "attainable" on this blog, more likely than not I'm talking about some kind of goal in my quixotic, never-ending quest to see every movie ever made.

In this case, however, I'm using it in relation to something I saw in a movie once, that felt like a beautiful dream, which I have now attained, in a manner of speaking.

I don't love Before Midnight as much as I do because I appreciate the ways Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy beat each other up over the course of 109 minutes. I do respect that, and I do think they -- along with their primary collaborator, Richard Linklater -- have put their finger on something true about the way any relationship changes during its course, in ways you hope are not so bad that the relationship runs its course. I haven't seen the movie since 2019, but nearly six years deeper into my marriage, I'd probably appreciate those observations now even more than I did the first two times I saw it.

No, what put me into a state of love for the movie, which became more complicated as my relationship changed with the movie over the course of its running time, was the scene where Hawke, Delpy, and their friends talk and eat and philosophize over a beautiful outdoor table covered with food, the Agean Sea behind them.

In that moment, I wanted to have that dinner, with my friends, at some point. Preferably, hosting it.

I've had lovely outdoor dinners with a half-dozen people who care for and challenge and tease each other, growing ever more sweetly inebriated as the light fades from the sky. But never before have I had such a platonic example of that -- since we're already talking Greece and philosophy -- in my own back yard.  

It's summer here in Australia, don't forget -- the waning days of summer, but summer still. And so it was we had a group of my wife's friends from high school and their partners over for dinner this past Saturday night, in celebration of my wife's birthday, representing four couples across seven people, my wife and myself not included. (One partner was an apology.) 

It's not uncommon to see these people for dinner, as we do it a couple times a year. But only recently has it been possible to do it at our house. With my wife as project manager, this summer we have built a deck in our back yard. It took a long time and it was very hard in spots, but it looks really good now, and I don't even really notice the flaws, like the uneven ends of the boards in relationship to one another, or the few spots where the footing is a bit soft, giving way to a part of the frame that's less sturdy. 

Then just recently we dressed it up with a new outdoor L-shaped couch (we had no such furniture before) and a new BBQ (the old one was about eight years old and rusted through). We even repainted some old chairs so they matched the BBQ. In short, the place looks really good.

Add in some Peruvian chicken, rice, salad and a pavlova for dessert, with wine flowing freely around the table, and even what they call "fairy lights" (outdoor deck lighting) strung up just earlier that day, we sat around this table, chewing the fat and slinging the shit, until my wife got enough sense about her to drive us indoors at 10:30 so as not to disturb the neighbors. There our guests stayed until after 12. 

Perhaps because they've had children with them in the past, some of whom were coerced into coming even into their late teens, this group has never stayed out that late. Me, I'd like to think it was the outdoor eating environment at the perfect temperature that we'd created, by the sea -- a few blocks from the sea, but by it nonetheless. 

In my sweetly inebriated state, I said something about being glad they were all here and that it reminded me of a scene from a movie. I probably should have kept that part to myself -- nothing like curdling a moment by calling too much attention to it and seeming to care too much about it -- but I received nothing but warm good vibes in return, and we carried on as if I had not just said something embarrassing.

Ethan and Julie and Richard might have been proud. 

Life in a day, Linklater style

When you have the house to yourself for a couple days, and you're a cinephile, you don't only watch movies. You do movie projects.

Hence this past weekend, when I watched the entire Before trilogy and Boyhood in one day.

I love the trilogy – with an asterisk that I’ll get to in a minute – but Before Sunrise was the only one of the three films I’d seen more than once, even though Before Midnight was my #2 movie of 2013. Seeing the characters age 18 years in one day was the main impetus behind my Linklater Day, but I wanted a fourth movie, and Boyhood was an obvious candidate to keep the theme going – making it, suppose, a Linklater/Hawke Day. I’d already seen Boyhood twice, but it’s a movie whose pleasures grow with each viewing, and it had been about four years since that second viewing.

But it was also my last full day at home before the family returns, so I couldn’t just watch movies. There were piles of undifferentiated crap I needed to clean up before they got home, to disguise the fact that I’d let their home become a hovel while they were gone.

So I created, and stuck to, the following schedule:

8 a.m. – Before Sunrise

12 p.m. – Before Sunset

4 p.m. – Before Midnight

8 p.m. – Boyhood

I suppose if it hadn’t been for Boyhood I could have tried to actually match the movies to their times of day, maybe watching Sunrise at some ridiculously early hour, Sunset in the late afternoon and Midnight at night. And though I’d been sleeping poorly with the family gone (always happens, not sure why) and I actually could have watched Sunrise at an ungodly hour, knowing I could take a nap later on, I liked the neatness of starting one of these movies every four and hours, and washing dishes/doing laundry in between.

I considered taking notes, to make sure I didn’t forget any little observations I might make about something Jesse said in the third movie that contradicted something he said in the first, that kind of thing. And I did notice a few such things that I’ll try to reproduce here. But I didn’t end up taking those notes, because I didn’t watch these movies to geek out on their minutiae or pick apart their internal consistency. I watched them to have the experience of life, of lives, wash over me, two lives in three movies and four lives in the fourth.

As such, I suppose my thoughts on the day will be a bit stream-of-consciousness. Which is appropriate for four movies that dwell on the vagaries of time and memory.

Since I need some place to start, I thought I’d share a couple technical challenges that impacted my viewings of two of the four movies.

I had Sunrise, Sunset and Boyhood as DVDs borrowed from the library, but my library reservation of Before Midnight didn’t come through in time. So I rented and streamed that off iTunes, which presented me with a few technical difficulties – though not, as it turned out, as significant a difficulty as one of the DVDs.

I got through Sunrise and Sunset with nary an issue, but the streaming of Before Midnight was imperfect. I have any number of possible candidates to blame, from the fact that I haven’t updated iTunes for a while, to the general slowness of my rapidly aging computer, to the crap internet we have. The good news, though, was that the way the viewing was sometimes compromised amplified the film’s themes. I’ll explain.

Though it didn’t happen throughout, the way the streaming issue manifested itself was in terms of the image lagging, and then going in fast forward for however long it took to catch up. The key to this not being that annoying was that the audio was totally unaffected. There wasn’t a single hiccup in Linklater’s dialogue (also written by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), which is really what you come to a Linklater movie to experience. So while the mouths were sometimes out of sync and occasionally it played like a sped up movie from the early 20^th century, there was no interruption to the audio flow. I allowed this to function as an extension of Linklater’s familiar concerns regarding our inability to grasp moments and hold onto them. Time is always speeding away out of our control. Or sometimes it does seem to stand still. But either way, it is not something we can control.

The problem with Boyhood was more annoying, but I did also manage to fit in with Linklater’s themes. Although I could not see much in the way of scratches on the disc’s surface, the Boyhood DVD did have glitches that in this case affected both the sound and the image. I wiped it clean with a tissue, to no avail. There were a couple times when I worried I’d have to abandon the viewing, and looked to see if it was available on any of my streaming services (it wasn’t). I could have rented it from iTunes, but fortunately, it never got annoying enough to resort to that measure. The worst that happened is that I missed a couple short chunks of the movie, four minutes on one occasion and eight minutes on another, which wasn’t fatal as I’d already seen the movie twice. All the other continuity blips were ten seconds or less. It was infrequent enough that I was able to persevere.

When I thought about the moments I’d missed – including, quite poignantly, the end of Patricia Arquette’s final speech about the next event on her schedule being her funeral – at first I regretted missing them. But then I thought “How perfectly Linklater.” Boyhood is a movie that, by design, lurches forward, missing moments in life that we might think should be a part of any highlight reel. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Again it feels like life is speeding away from us, and we look up one day and our child is graduating high school. Missing little bits of Boyhood only made the loss the movie is exploring all the more profound.

But back to the main impetus for this viewing day. What would I think of the growth, or lack thereof, of Jesse and Celine over the course of 18 years of their lives, consumed by me within the space of ten hours?

I did indeed notice those small inconsistencies, which I would not say resulted from a lack of care by the three central filmmakers, but rather, functioned as an intentional point about the way human beings are inconsistent, or how their viewpoints change over time. In Before Sunrise, for example, Jesse asks Celine if she believes in reincarnation as part of his hypothesizing on how a million reincarnated souls from the beginnings of human existence have splintered themselves into the billions of people inhabiting the planet today. She responds, definitively, that she does believe in reincarnation. In one of the later movies – Before Midnight I think – he asks her that question again, and she says she doesn’t.

Jesse regularly says that he “remembers everything” – including the type of condom they used in Vienna – but he doesn’t remember asking her whether she believes in reincarnation, and therefore can’t hold her to her original response. This is just the nature of human experience. It was a relatively insignificant moment in their day, and maybe he didn’t even remember positing his “million souls for a billion lives” theory with her – maybe he used that one on all the girls at that time. But neither is her inconsistency an issue. She may have once believed in reincarnation, but as the practicalities of the world crushed her, she stopped believing in it. Or maybe she never believed in it, but saying she did was part of the self she wanted to present to Jesse when she first met him, when she thought that’s what he wanted her to say. Now that they’re married and there’s no wooing left to be done, she can drop the charade.

One thing I noticed, though, was that watching these movies back-to-back-to-back did not give me some grand unifying theory of Jesse or Celine. I have ideas about each of them, which the actors worked on and consciously toyed with over the course of the three films. But what struck me was just how much these did indeed seem like the same characters, matured in some ways and still stunted in others, over the course of nearly two decades. I’m not sure if Hawke and Delpy made specific choices to achieve this, or it was a function of them playing only small variations on their actual selves, but there’s a remarkable overarching consistency to their characters, which is probably only enhanced by the type of inconsistencies mentioned above.

Rather than talking about Jesse and Celine as such, though, I want to talk a bit about myself. When Linklater is at his best, he gets you interfacing with yourself, examining the way his themes touch on your own life.

And as it happens, these movies line up with my own life pretty significantly. I’m one of those viewers who can say that he’s taken similar steps to Jesse and Celine as they’ve taken them, as both Hawke and Delpy are within four years of me in age. However, they’re playing about two years younger than they actually are, as they were supposed to be 23, 32 and 41 in these movies, when they were actually more like 25, 34 and 43. Anyway, the point is, I was doing some of the things they were doing, when they were doing them, in my real life.

Only I didn’t see Before Sunrise when it first came out. In fact, I didn’t see it until 2001. Who knows how my first viewing might have been different in 1995, a year I was melancholy about graduating from college, but in 2001 I was swept up in the romanticism of it. Which is interesting because that was a bit of a tumultuous year for me. I moved from New York to Los Angeles in May, and had a really difficult transitional summer there, complicated by a relationship that didn’t pan out the way I hoped it would. However, I saw it in November that year, and by then, I’d settled in and had new romantic irons in the fire, though I was not dating anyone just yet. I guess my new sense of optimism was enough for me to dive right into Before Sunrise.

I did see Before Sunset in the theater, and now we get to the asterisk I teased you with earlier. Although this is the favorite movie in the series for a lot of people I know, I was in no condition to appreciate it when I saw it. The summer of 2004 was another time of great tumult for me, except instead of just having emerged from it, as was the case with Before Sunrise, I was still right in the thick of it when I watched Before Sunset. At the time, I was mourning the end of/trying to rekindle a nearly two-year relationship, while also desperately flinging myself at a long distance rebound relationship with the intensity of an addict. The optimistic ending of Before Sunset didn’t land for me as I felt a particular pessimism about my own prospects.

The interesting thing now, in watching Before Sunset for the second time, is to realize how soon things were going to look up for me – and in a way that feels specifically related to this movie. At the end of 2004 I met my wife, and our first big trip together was to go to my friend’s wedding in Spain in June of 2005. We combined that trip with four days in Paris. So only a year after I watched Jesse and Celine walk around Paris, feeling hopeless even as they felt hopeful, I myself was walking around Paris with my future wife. It was something I hadn’t ever considered until I watched this movie again, and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I still think it’s only my third favorite of these movies, but that is now a very strong third favorite. (And I had additional appreciation for it in the context of this marathon, as a result of its sub-80-minute running time.)

My second viewing of Before Midnight also involved the realization of something I could never have known would have been related to me when I first watched the movie. I watched Before Midnight about three months before I moved to Australia, but since that move came together so quickly, it wasn’t even a twinkle in our eye when I saw the movie. (In fact, we’d just bought a house the year before, so moving was probably the furthest thing from our minds.) One of the trepidations about being married to someone from another country is you never know which country you’re going to live in, and whether you may need to move to that other country for the good of your marriage/family, leaving behind the country you know. This is a major point of argument between Celine and Jesse in Before Midnight, as Jesse is feeling the acute loss of not being there as his teenage son grows up. He tries to sell Celine on moving to Chicago. Only a few months after I saw this transpire on screen, I moved to Australia for the good of my wife’s career prospects. Nearly six years later, we still live here.

Some other things about the movie really ring true that I couldn’t have known at the time, either. In 2013 I had only one child, who was not yet three years old. As my second was born on the first of January in 2014, I must have already known he was coming when I saw the movie in May, but only just. So at the time, Celine and Jesse’s argument about who did what in the marriage, vis-à-vis the children, was probably just a bit abstract. Now that I have two, I’m even more conscious of the truth that the man (me) packs only his clothes when the family goes on vacation, while the woman (my wife) packs everything else. I saw in myself some of Jesse’s blithe lack of awareness of just how much Celine does for their family, I’m ashamed to say. However, I’m glad to say I think it’s something both Jesse and I are working on.

As I said, this was a bit stream-of-consciousness and it has probably gone on longer than you care to read, unless you are Nick Prigge and eat up new Before talk in perpetuity.

I’ll close by saying that this was an enthralling day of movie viewing, with built-in breaks where menial tasks allowed me to ponder the significance of what I’d watched. It was a day where memories from my own romantic and family life swam in and out of the front of my mind, reacquainting me with people I hadn’t thought of in years, and how we’d done right by each other, or failed in that regard.

But neither was it a melancholy day. Even when movies are about melancholy things, they invigorate your spirit when they are as good as these four.  

Midnight surprise

THIS POST CONTAINS NO SPOILERS.

(That disclaimer is primarily for Nick's benefit.)

One of the benefits of being really busy at work and barely posting on your blog and not keeping up with movie news and basically having your head in the sand in general is that you can roll up to your computer on a Thursday to scan the options for a matinee movie on a potential early-release Friday before Memorial Day weekend, and learn that all of the sudden, Before Midnight is in theaters.

(Run-on sentence intentional, which Nick will also appreciate.)

I mean, I knew that the third (and final?) movie in Richard Linklater's Before series was hitting theaters in the month of May, and I knew we had only one week remaining in the month of May. However, being really busy and barely posting and having your head in the sand means that you forget what you knew. Allowing nice little surprises like this one.

Even better, it's playing at a perfect time (2:05) for my potential early release (1:30), while still giving me plenty of time to pick up my son at daycare (5:00).

What I'm most curious about with regards to this third meeting of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) is the emotional impact it will have on me.

I watched the brilliant Before Sunrise on March 25th, 2002, when I was about three weeks into a relationship with a woman who I thought would become my wife. Even at that point I saw everything lining up perfectly. We shared a geographical background (both from New England), we shared a mindset (less than I thought it turns out -- she's more conservative than she admits) and most importantly, we shared an attraction. It was one of those situations where you just know it. Of course, those feelings are not always correct, since we did not get married.

However, in that dizzy spell of early-relationship romanticism, I encountered Before Sunrise at just the perfect time. What some people might interpret as a melancholy story was, for me, a warm embrace of the possibilities of life and love. I ate it up.

It was a different story when I saw Before Sunset on July 23rd, 2004. The aforementioned girlfriend and I had been broken up for eight months, though it was only within the past couple months that I had started to think there was no possibility of us getting back together. It was one of those situations where I did the breaking up, then regretted it, and expended countless hours and numerous increasingly desperate ploys on trying to get us back together. By July 23rd, 2004, I was pretty sure it wouldn't happen. So as I walked into the theater to see Before Sunset, my heart was heavy. As I left what many people consider an equally brilliant film to its predecessor, if not better, I felt a bittersweetness that was more bitter than sweet.

It'll be interesting to see how Before Midnight strikes me today.

Today, I have been married for five years and been in a relationship with my wife for more than eight. In fact, I met her only about five months (almost exactly) after seeing Before Sunset. Our marriage is a happy one, though of course it has its share of the kind of difficulties that are part and parcel to the institution. We don't always agree and it's not always easy, but overall, it's an "easy" marriage by marriage standards. One I'm thankful for and lucky to have.

So I don't expect to emerge from Before Midnight feeling especially melancholy, at least not for reasons external to the movie. Though I do wonder how this movie will, like its predecessors, speak to the place I currently find myself. I haven't learned a lot about the plot of Before Midnight, but I understand that perhaps Celine and Jesse have been together since Before Sunset, meaning that domesticity is the dominant mode of their relationship nowadays. Of course, that may be wrong, but if it's right, it could very well have a lot to say about how a person's core "relationship" is affected by marriage or a close facsimile thereof.

Now, I just need to get that early release.