![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Before Sunset
Jan. 17th, 2014 12:15 amBefore Sunset is the more cynical sequel to Before Sunrise. In the first movie, Celine and Jesse meet on a train in Europe, and spent the night walking around Vienna discussing life, love, and the meaning of the universe. They arrange to meet again in six months.
But they missed the meeting, we discover in Before Sunset, which takes place nine years later. Jesse wrote a book about their night in Vienna. Celine meets him again at a book signing in Paris, and they go for a walk through Paris in the small space of time he has before he needs to catch his flight.
It is a more cynical movie, but at the same time, the word doesn’t seem quite right. They were already doubtful about romantic love in the first movie, and in the second they’re even more doubtful about love - enough that they can’t give themselves over to their serendipitous romance even to the extent that they did in the first movie - they also seem to want it more fiercely than they did in the first movie. They’re no longer young enough to live on possibility the way they did when they were twenty-three.
I think there’s a sense, in the first movie, that they half-expect to be proven wrong in their cynicism about romantic love, that they perhaps believe they are disproving their own theses as they speak. By the second movie, their doubts have been confirmed by life experience, and their anger at life’s imperfection has a visceral edge that it didn’t when they were younger.
And they’re beginning to worry that it’s not life, it’s them. Jesse notes that research suggests that people have happiness set points: six months after winning the lottery or becoming paraplegics, most people will have returned to the same level of happiness (or unhappiness) that they felt before. Maybe they’re just doomed to be unhappy. Maybe their doubts, which undercut their yearning for romantic love even in their moments of greatest romantic sincerity, are self-fulfilling prophecies.
Early in the movie, they discuss whether or not wanting inevitably makes us unhappy. Celine argues that it doesn’t, that we are at our most alive when we want. But feeling alive is not the same thing as feeling happy.
These are somewhat depressing movies - depressing is not the right word - discontenting movies; they not only insist on the imperfection of the world but insistently rage against it. But they fascinate me in their ability to take a small story - bounded by a single city, a small space of time, and with only two important characters - and make it about everything.
But they missed the meeting, we discover in Before Sunset, which takes place nine years later. Jesse wrote a book about their night in Vienna. Celine meets him again at a book signing in Paris, and they go for a walk through Paris in the small space of time he has before he needs to catch his flight.
It is a more cynical movie, but at the same time, the word doesn’t seem quite right. They were already doubtful about romantic love in the first movie, and in the second they’re even more doubtful about love - enough that they can’t give themselves over to their serendipitous romance even to the extent that they did in the first movie - they also seem to want it more fiercely than they did in the first movie. They’re no longer young enough to live on possibility the way they did when they were twenty-three.
I think there’s a sense, in the first movie, that they half-expect to be proven wrong in their cynicism about romantic love, that they perhaps believe they are disproving their own theses as they speak. By the second movie, their doubts have been confirmed by life experience, and their anger at life’s imperfection has a visceral edge that it didn’t when they were younger.
And they’re beginning to worry that it’s not life, it’s them. Jesse notes that research suggests that people have happiness set points: six months after winning the lottery or becoming paraplegics, most people will have returned to the same level of happiness (or unhappiness) that they felt before. Maybe they’re just doomed to be unhappy. Maybe their doubts, which undercut their yearning for romantic love even in their moments of greatest romantic sincerity, are self-fulfilling prophecies.
Early in the movie, they discuss whether or not wanting inevitably makes us unhappy. Celine argues that it doesn’t, that we are at our most alive when we want. But feeling alive is not the same thing as feeling happy.
These are somewhat depressing movies - depressing is not the right word - discontenting movies; they not only insist on the imperfection of the world but insistently rage against it. But they fascinate me in their ability to take a small story - bounded by a single city, a small space of time, and with only two important characters - and make it about everything.
