Before Sunset Spoilers, I guess.
As a human, as a young person, I idealise situations. I sometime have a habit of creating dialogue scenes, conversations, and having them play out exactly as I want them to. Sometimes it means someone agrees for a date, sometimes it could be a break up or a fight, but it is always about love. Because love is tempermental, more then anything else in this world, it shifts for no reason, it fades for no reason, the people we love never fits the same mold as people who have stuff in common with us, and, most importantly, it is the most potent and all consuming of emotions. And so, at least for me personally, I craft narratives in order to be able to put some sort of order to love, or to be able to understand it, in the way I
want to understand. I try to remind myself "life is random, you must be ready for a situation you don't want" but I never listen to that part of me.
If
Before Sunrise is the all-encompassing fantasy I have created, then
Before Sunset is the voice telling me to pull back, the voice trying to remind me of the real world. As Jesse and Celine wander around Paris, the real world and it's problems become so apparent. And we see, in that incredibly powerful scene in the back of the car, this toll it has taken, this dream has taken on their own lives. Lets say you acheive the dream, the perfect moment of love, of passion. How hard would it be to have to live an ordinary life afterwards?
And so we get a meditation on that and other themes, moments, and little detials and such, stuff that was the bulk of the first movie. Linklater's camera really gets at why I love Paris, the beauty of the city, and the beauty of the weather on that day. My god, that ride on the seine was gorgeous! But the dilogue is what matters, and here more then in any movie it flows gracefully. Because thios movie isn basically a screenplay, but the jumps are never felt and the whole movie becomes like one huge dilogue scene. Every just works, from the jokes to the outbursts to declarations of love to stating political opinions.
And I almost feel as if this is the person I will become in, oh, 14 odd years. Clovis constantly goes on about how you have to be the same age as these characters to fully appreciate these films, but I don't agree. I've alreayd talked about how these movies link into my own view on love, and I feel as though this isn't a movie which is made specifically for a certain age, even in the aspect that it works better when you are older. I can understand Clovis. This is a not a movie where your reaction is dictated by age but by world view. 100 relationships with bastards and you could still be a romantic, a perfect relationship and you could still be paranoid it's going to break apart at any moment. Life is too random, too chaotic to prescribe timelines or dates or anything. And that's what this movie is about. Things happen, and we have to make the best of them. And this is why, in the end, I think Jesse Stays with Celine. I think when he says "I know" at the end, he just sort of realises that he has to take hold of this.