So you want to make a talking heads movie. Nothing more than two people chatting for the duration--walking along an avenue, stopping at a cafe, etc., with very occasional developments in the physical world, but nearly every development in the film flowing out of their mouths.
Pretty bold. Or more likely stupid. Arrogant? Prolly.
Even when the Talking Heads made a movie, they filled it with a lot more than just standing there performing their wonderful songs.
Better be some damn good talking. Wonderful insights about the magical moments that illuminate our lives, and small touching developments about the personal conflict transpiring between them.
Who the hell could pull that off? Especially the Big Ideas stuff? Lots of stories get the intimate stuff right, but 999 times out of a thousand the Big Shit just sounds like a big load of crap. Even when they reach for those insights only for a moment or two.
If I had realized going in that was all this movie amounted to, it's highly unlikely I would have ever wasted my time on it.
Thank God for that ignorance.
Ethan Hawke, I guess, that's what kept me away all this time--from both films, Before Sunset and the film it followed up on nine years later, Before Sunrise. Seems like such a mealy mouthed guy alternately posing as a hardass stud or intellectual. Wasn't buying either one.
I might buy the intellectual now. (He shares a screenplay credit with his costar and director.) And I don't mind looking at him anymore, even if he would be infinitely more pleasing without all that wispy kudzu he can't really grow creeping around his mouth.
And I'm finally sold on him as an actor, because this kind of stuff is really hard to pull off, and he does it pretty well.
He has the misfortune, in that respect, of doing it opposite someone absolutely spellbinding. And so dazzling in all the little moves she makes it's impossible not to believe this is not only her, but a changing picture of her, riding through a dizzying onslaught of contradictory feelings about what's happening to her, what it says about her life, how she feels about that.
Sometimes he appears a bit . . . like an actor delivering his lines really well across from her, which sounds harsh and debilitating, but what I really mean is she makes nearly every actor in every play or movie seem in retrospect like at best a really good actor, he just has the bad luck or courage to do it in front of her.
Seriously. He's good, very good, sometimes even great. She just puts the lie to everyone else in the universe.
Never seen anyone quite like her. Obviously.
I'm sure I've seen other people just as good. But not today. (Or last night. Just listened to the first half again just now as I did the breakfast dishes.) They will return again soon I'm sure to their rightful places in my memory, but for now she eclipses all that came before her on my little cubicle on the planet.
Meanwhile. The personal story progresses wonderfully. I won't spoil the ending for anyone yet to see it, except to assure you you won't be disappointed. If you're me. Perfect note. Perfect ending. Not too much, not too little, Goldilocks.
And the Ideas. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
My favorite was his sudden lament (now I will be spoiling lots of little things, and they won't do you much good without the details anyway. I'm quite sure from past experience that they'll sound like so much pseudo-intellectual bullshit naked on the page here, but for those of you already relishing the memories, perhaps this will jog a few. Of course I'm ultimately being selfish here: hope to return many times to meander around inside them myself. And by many I mean six. Roughly. If I had to predict, I'd say an hour from now, a week, 47 days, eight years, eight years and one hour, eight years and three days, 17 years and 42. If I should be so lucky. And I expect to. Huh. Eight. Never seem to get these things right, do I? But close.)
OK, my favorite was his sudden lament, late in the game, when he started unveiling more of the truth, that his sex life was abysmal, like one of those Trappist monks he'd been talking about, ten times in four years, maybe, and she starts laughing at him, and he's a little hurt--you think that's funny?--and she explains no, no, I'm not laughing at your sex life, I'm just wondering where these monks who get to have sex ten times every four years?
heeheehee. I love that for so many reasons. I love the way this movie caught me time and again and again on so many of the tiny little lies I tell myself, that like the dry patches in my sex life equating to a monk's existence. I will never even grasp a whisper of the experience of monastic life, yet I'm so damn quick to claim their burden.
Ahhhhhh. Springs to mind a Dubious Achievement Award Esquire presented Mariette Hartley a few decades ago--remember Mariette Hartley? from the Polaroid commercials as the Mrs. James Garner, mainly--for saying she had been monogamous off and on for the past several years. "On and off who, Marriette?" was the headline I believe. (". . . off what"? which is funnier? sometimes I don't know these things.)
Hennyway. Jotted a whole bunch more down on an old newspaper lying on the couch that I kept running back to from the sink with soapy hands and soiling it and soaking parts of the page, so I had to keep rotating around to different open spots. Luckily it was a full page Visa ad with lots and lots of white space to capture my elation.
(Hmmmm. It has dried now, because I got a phone call halfway through the last paragraph and had to break. Curled and lumpy, but I think I can still make most of it out. Better do it soon, so I can still remember what the hell I was talking about with some of my soiled scrawls, but I've got to run for awhile, so this will have to satiate you for now.)
Update/Epilogue:
Wow, just looked up Before Sunset's boxoffice and it sure didn't do much. $5.6 million for it's entire North American run. Great per-theatre averages, but it never played more than 202 theatres or ranked higher than 19th for the week.
Didn't realize what a tiny little arthouse hit this was. Which both saddens and inspires me.
Such a wonderful little film and that's as much of the audience it can penetrate?
Or that's as little as it penetrated the marketplace and still it made such an impact on our collective psyche? Everyone I know has seen this film or intends to, talks about it, at least is aware of it. It seeped its way in.
I realize my friends are not very representative of the population at large, but they are far more representative of the creative population responsible for producing all the future films, books, movies, etc. It's ripples will not be forgotten.
Dutton (Penguin) in early 2009. 
