Sunrise, Sunset

The cinetrix is a sucker, an unabashed romantic [which explains why she is beguiled by the illusion of motion on a screen]. She still remembers fondly coming out of a special sneak screening of the new Linklater movie on a snowy night in January 1995 and making snow angels with her friends on the patio of the Harvard Faculty Club. Yes, Before Sunrise cast a spell that could make the architecture of Le Corbusier and the Federalists enchanted and fraught with possibility. The snow helped.

I like to feel his eyes on me when I look away.

A year and a half later I was in graduate school in New York. My heart had been broken. A classmate, Viennese and quite beautiful, explained to me the dream geography the trams traversed as Céline and Jesse talked and talked on. In fact, you can see my old classmate Alexandra in the scene where Jesse and Céline pretend to talk to their friends on the telephone. It's set in a café, and Alexandra is the woman who says quizzically to the complaining American, "The service?" [Apparently, the scene was shot quite late at night, and everyone was drunk on cognac. Movie magic, kids!]

As a recovering bookish type, the cinetrix was always charmed that the movie took place on Bloomsday, that other tribute to a great first date. [It also meant that the meeting in six-month's time would land on her birthday.] Anthony Lane noticed, too.

Jesse mentions the date in passing, and no more is said, but it can hardly be an accident: they have had a happy Bloomsday. How are you supposed to take this hint? If you think it's a flashy name-drop, buying into Joyce for the sake of intellectual glamour, fair enough; but I think it answers another, more respectable need. The point is not that Linklater has his head in his books--he'd never let them cramp his style--but that his movie is about people with books in their heads.

Such precognition! In celebration of the release of Before Sunset [incidentally, Hoberman raves], here's the lede from Anthony Lane's review of the first film.

Before Sunrise starts with strangers on a train. One is Jesse (Ethan Hawke), a young American kicking around the Continent on a Eurailpass; the other is Céline (Julie Delpy), a French student making her way back to Paris. They start talking as the train hums toward Vienna, where Jesse is due to disembark--a foolish, not to say tragic, plan, since it involves never seeing Céline again. True, he has only just met her, but already he has spotted her copy of Georges Bataille, and if there is one rule that governs the life of the seasoned traveller it is: Once you find a French blonde reading Georges Bataille of her own free will, don't let her out of your sight. Hang in there like a limpet.

[Is it so wrong that the cinetrix is really hoping for an Antoine Doinel-type series?]