Feature Film || Before Sunrise (1995) & Before Sunset (2004) Parallelism
Celine: This is a little weird | Jesse: This is so weird.
I make a lot of these weird parallelism gifs. I should post them all just to spam people’s dashes! I especially like how they’re both kind of fiddling with their hands when they say the line.
Almost a decade ago, when Before Sunrise’s sequel was still hot and much buzzed about, Ethan Hawke had expressed his interest in making a romantic opus of incredibly epic proportions. How? By releasing a Before (insert-time-of-day-here) movie every nine years. Now, right after Sunset was released, we all know that Linklater, Hawke and Delpy were already talking about the third, but did we really expect it to happen?
Much of the appeal of the first two movies, aside from the dialogue of course, was the open-endedness. Just as Jesse had said in Sunset,there is a certain kind of magic in ambiguous endings. Letting the audience take part in the story and decide how things turn out. Hopefully, they stick to that, one way or another.
My fear here is that the dialogue won’t ever live up to the insight it had in the first film. It was a bit watered down for the second movie, especially since a lot of the conversations were really to bring the audience up to speed on the gap years. There’s charm in youth and spontaneity and a sense of abandon that the first movie really got, but I guess we can’t expect more of that, especially when the characters and the world have both aged. We’ll probably hear more musings on age-appropriate issues.
Also, it’ll be interesting to see how they keep a certain level of the romantic ideal alive in an age where, inevitably, technology will have to come into play. It also concerns me that, realistically, the nineties is the last time a love story with this feeling of it’s-now-or-never can really happen, which is a theme that really had a huge impact in driving the characters’ decisions. With social networking, that romantic ideal is kind of lost.
Reservations aside, I put my trust in the trio. After all, like Delpy had said, they wouldn’t make the film if they didn’t have something worth saying. Fingers crossed.
