#Scurf113: What if Celine had picked up with the Viennese bum
Ruminations of the first part of Richard Linklater's Before series
Before Sunrise quells many thirsts, but also evokes questions, curiosities and pleasant memories.
As a writer I’ve been going through my creative, adult life for the last handful of years thinking everyday about the Before series. Through the trilogy Linklater does something that is not only singular but also immensely poignant. He captures a vignette of life as it was once lived, the early brush of love and how we generally allow things to slip from in between our fingers. For me, above all else, what it captures near perfectly is the feeling of “watching life pass by”.
In Before Sunrise as we see Celine and Jessie converse, not through witty banter, but real, meaningful exchange of ideas and conversation, we also see how with each passing moment they both decide to be with one another. Again and again. Hour after hour we see them both find traces of something strange in the other and yet continue to be with them. It is those small decisions that make the first film so immensely rewatchable.
Anyone who has been a couple of decades or so alive on this planet will tell you the importance of these seemingly mundane decisions — whether or not to open that window, what to cook, how much coffee to put in the mug. These decisions gather immediate, renewed eminence when seen through the lens of love, family, studies. What Before Sunrise does is that it raises the bar of these anodyne everyday knacks and exalts them into life-altering moments, without bringing any attention to them all this while.
The scene with the palm reader puts this beautifully into perspective. Celine and Jessie are both tired after a day of walking around in Vienna, trying to understand each other, not yet exhausted by the length and breadth of each other’s lives they have traversed. Jessie is childish, a little too American and therefore culturally impatient when he sees the palm reader’s lackadaisical attitude, wafting her way directly to Celine. Even Celine points it out later, as he cribs about the clairvoyant’s larger than real life notions that had no tether to real life. What he says has substance.
There is an absence of music to her insights. They seem poor, hasty, bankable. But Celine seems taken in. As Jessie cribs, going on about the limited meditations by the soothsayer, Celine’s expressions say more than her words. Eyebrows furrowed, she narrows her eyes at him, as if almost about to chafe at his words. But within a blip she sees something in Jessie — what exactly only she knows — a twinkle in his eyes or perhaps the curl of his lips as they broke into a mischievous smile. Something small, quotidian, effortless causes her to break into a believing smile. A ruminative grin that shows adulation, affection, even curiosity. A look of trust, annoyance and excitement simmers.
It’s in those fomenting moments that Linklater captures the beat of how two people fall for one another. In this brief, maybe three minute sequence, we see Jessie take a risk and be his garrulous, disbelieving, childish self. In those vulnerable few moments we see an embodied sense of eagerness in him. That he really wants to know this person seated next to him, and is ready to bear all his thoughts before her. And Celine takes cognisance of that nakedness. Rewards it too. She’s mottled by the words he’s spoken, doesn’t lend them too much weight, but also respects his thinking. She takes on a blasè attitude, giving Jessie the much needed space to be himself.
Funny how I started this blog wanting to think with you all on the page about Celine and the Vienese bum, but words took me some place else. Perhaps I will use the next blog to write about that what if, and we bring this thought chain to a pause here. It’s an alt und schön thought, that loving takes its time. But to see it being represented thus in Before Sunrise is singular. This level of intelligence and attention to details requires for it to be savoured in a blog of its own.
One of my favourite films. I find myself thinking about all three a lot