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 20th 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.
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