the attempt
by Douglas Messerli
Richard
Linklater and Kim Krizan (screenplay), Richard Linklater (director) Before Sunrise / 1995
Nothing that happens is truly eventful.
They meet two amateur actors who invite them to a play (inexplicably starring a
cow who thinks it may be a dog), pay homage to a small cemetery for people who
have died without names, visit the Prater
Ferris wheel (famous for the scene between Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton in The Third Man), drop in to gawk at
Vienna’s great cathedral, wile away time at several cafes (in one of which Céline
has her palm read), watch a belly dancer do what Céline describes as a “birthing
dance,” visit a grungy music-dance club, steal a bottle of wine, and make out
in the grass.
What does matter is their conversation,
at times self-conscious and hesitant, at other times adolescently cute, and at
still other moments probing and exploratory as they ponder the meaning of their
lives and what the future holds for them.
Perhaps it is Linklater’s courage in
making so much out of so little that finally endears us to his filmmaking. As
in his later masterwork Boyhood this
director is gutsy enough to let his actors be utterly who they are, somewhat
goofy and permanent adolescents who, much like all of us, are trying, nonetheless,
to find their identities so they might represent themselves to the world as “grow
ups.” As anyone over 50 knows, there is no such thing as a true “grown up.” And
this young couple already seems to perceive that we remain children always of
the failed people who pretend they are grown up mothers and fathers. Céline’s
obviously wealthy parents (her father is an architect) are doting and loving,
but still drive her crazy with their attempts to define her own life; Jesse’s
parents, obviously quite unhappy in their marriage (they are now divorced),
didn’t really want his birth, the fact of which has left him with a sense of being
an outsider, which, he argues, makes his life all the more special, something
like a gift he hadn’t deserved.
As in several of his other films,
moreover, Before Sunrise attempts—without
much success—to get at the heart of the differences between genders, man and
woman. Like many of their age, the woman is more mature (Céline often feels
like she is an old lady), while Jesse admits to feeling that he is still a boy.
He kisses, she observes, like a teenager. But she, on the other hand, is filled
with fears (she is daily horrified by the fact of dying) of which Jesse seems
free.
On the other hand, Jesse, to protect
himself, puts up a wall of cynicism, while she is often an open dreamer,
readily willing, for example, to believe the fortuneteller’s predictions.
This romantic couple even has an argument
or two, predicting some of the difficulties we will see rise up between them 18
years later in the director’s Before
Midnight of 2013, as the budding-feminist Céline accuses Jesse of being a wounded
rooster when he mocks the palm reader and dismisses a vagrant poet, whom they
pay to write a poem containing the word “milk-shakes.”
Although neither of its characters is
particularly religious—both seeming to shun traditional religion—they are born
with a faith deeper than all the hosanna’s belted out by of a congregation of
true believers on an early Sunday morning. For they believe, finally, in one
another. Céline expresses it best: “If there is a God,” she hesitantly begins, “it
exists in this little space between us,” not in what eventually happens, she
qualifies, but “in the attempt,” “the attempt of understanding and sharing.”
Belief, she concludes, lies in “the attempt.”
The film ends with another such “attempt,”
the two of them promising to get together again with a few months, a promise
which becomes the subject of Linklater’s second of these films, Before Sunset of 2004.
Los Angeles, February
8, 2016
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