Film: "Before Sunrise" (1995) and "Before Sunset" (2004)

I am one of the few people I know who'd never seen the cult romantic film of the 1990s, Before Sunrise, by Richard Linklater.



Nor its sequel, Before Sunset, set 9 years later and written and directed again by Linklater, again with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as protagonists.



And I'm glad I didn't, because this means I could see both movies one night after the other, from the perspective of someone who is more or less 9 years older than the characters find themselves at the end of Before Sunset. They've grown up, but I've grown up even more and I feel tenderness for both their 20-year and their 30-year old selves.

In Before Sunset the characters reassess their one-day/one-night encouter of 9 years earlier, confronting each other on that memory, checking the details, seeking reassurance that the emotional impact each of them experienced wasn't a dream, or an invention, or theirs alone. That that special connection was real for both.

They roam the streets of Paris as they had roamed those of Vienna, but in reverse, this time walking and walking, then catching a boat, then a car, while their younger selves had met on a train, jumped on a bus, then dined on a boat, then walked and walked.

Time is even more pressing now: while in 1995 they had a day and a night available, now there's only a couple of hours and yet they speak even more, jumping straight into a dicussion about politics, the world, American imperialism, then about their work, their lives since they last met, their loves. And finally each other.

Before Sunrise is a film that makes a grown-up viewer ache at the innocence of Jesse and Celine, their hope in love and fate that they cannot disguise behind the apparence of youthful cinicism. And yet, because they are clever and intense, they're also aware that what they are experiencing, this fleeting intensity between them, might also be nothing else than the making of a future memory in a life full other experiences.

They accept the possibility that they might never see each other again, chosing not to exchange numbers, names, addresses, setting just a vague date for a possible reunion that they might or might not keep. To them, at 23, it doesn't really matter, or not that much, because they're already launched in opposite trajectories (the bus that takes Jesse to the airport - the train that takes Celine to Paris).

But 9 years later they know that connections like the one they had are rare to come by and their reliance, their trust in fate has become tinged with the awareness of what they have lost. Will they let chance, time, casuality decide for them again?

Will they simply revise the memory of their first encounter with the endnote of their second meeting, just adding a chapter to the book Jesse has written about Celine, a line to Celine's song about Jesse? Will they continue to add appendixes every 9 years in random European cities?

Or will they have the courage to mesh the memory into the present, in the here and now?

The ending of Before Sunset answers the question and it's magnificent: a few seconds, one line of dialogue, one moment of Ethan Hawke's acting that illuminates the sense of both films and gives them one of the most perfect, moving, imaginative open closures I've seen in any film.

I'm an Eric Rohmer fan, I've always been. And these films reminded me of the Moral Tales and Comedies and Proverbs, for the incessant dialogue and the small silences and gestures that are equally important, all immersed in the reality of two cities that almost disappear vis-a-vis what is happening to the characters.

And yet, as in Rohmer's films, nothing could happen if not in those specific locations, with their real geographies and sounds. Epecially in Before Sunset, the soundtrack is minimal and perfectly integrated in the plot: Celine's song, the Nina Simone CD Jesse plays in Celine's apartment, an accordion player on the street, the noise of wind and water on the Seine, the traffic...

Before Sunrise ends with a collage of shots of all the places Jesse and Celine have visited in Vienna, now empty of people in the first light of morning, and redolent with the absence of our characters as they falled inevitably in love. Before Sunset, instead, opens with shots of empty places that, as the film progresses, we'll see Jesse and Celine occupy.

It is, of course, part of the inversion that Linklater adopts as the structure of his second film, but it's also much more than that, a suggestion that places - even iconic and beautiful places - such Vienna and Paris, only really matter to the extent that we exist in them.

Or as we remember them, and continue remembering them while we embrace new moments and new places.

Film: "Waltz With Bashir"

I haven't blogged here in a while, which is unusual considering how many plays, films and art exhibition I've seen lately (I haven't read as much, unfortunately).

Instead of talking about the relative disappointment I've felt for films that have received public and critical acclaim (such as Milk, Doubt and Slumdog Millionaire), and what I consider the ridiculous overlooking of Clint Eastwood's magnificent Gran Torino, I want to talk briefly about the masterpiece of 2008: Waltz With Bashir, by the Israeli director Ari Folman.



It's a film that has that rare quality of succeding in being a number of things at the same time, all successfully: topical (the disaster that is the Middle East now, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in particular) and historical (the 1982 Lebanon war and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila); political (Folman's condemnation of the Israeli military and ruling classes of the time and of now is presented indirectly, but without appeal) and highly personal (it's about recuperating one's memory by facing responsibility and guilt; dreams and nightmares; being young and then suddenly old); documentary and "fiction", thanks to the use of real interviews and the structure of an investigative piece, but presenting them through animation, which allows for beauty and poetry to surface even amid the horror of wars.

We follow the director/protagonist as he tries to remember his partecipation in the Lebanon war and especially what exactly he was doing during the three days he, together with the Israeli army, supported the siege of the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut by the Christian Phalangists, who massacred what conservative estimates put around 3000 civilians, including women and children.

In order to make sense of a recurrent dream that haunts him but that still doesn't allow him to recollect those days, Folman needs to talk with fellow soldiers, witnesses, journalists, politicians. The perspective is entirely Israeli, because it's about an Israeli soldier dealing with his role in the war.

Folman manages to connect the scenes of that war to our collective cultural visualisation of both Vietnam and Iraq; but in the final, devastating part set in the Palestinian compound, the references to our visual unconscious on the Warsaw ghetto and WWII, are even more chilling.

When the protagonist finally pieces his own personal and national history together, he can remember, at last. And what he remembers is so terrible that the animation is replaced by the real, uncensored scenes of what the news people found in Sabra and Shatila when they were finally allowed to enter.

No words, no music, because memory cannot and should not always be rendered poetic or exorcised by art. Sometimes what we need to do, more than anything else, is just remember.