Tangos Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight: a Conversational Journey with Jesse and Celine Randy Rasmussen University of North Dakota, [email protected]
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University of North Dakota UND Scholarly Commons Librarian Publications Chester Fritz Library 3-27-2018 Tangos Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight: A Conversational Journey with Jesse and Celine Randy Rasmussen University of North Dakota, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.und.edu/cfl-lp Part of the Film and Media Studies Commons Recommended Citation Rasmussen, Randy, "Tangos Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight: A Conversational Journey with Jesse and Celine" (2018). Librarian Publications. 2. https://commons.und.edu/cfl-lp/2 This Book is brought to you for free and open access by the Chester Fritz Library at UND Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Librarian Publications by an authorized administrator of UND Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Tangos Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight: A Conversational Journey with Jesse and Celine by Randy Rasmussen Table of Contents Preface 1 Introduction: The Space Between 4 1. Before Sunrise: The Dance Begins 9 2. Before Sunset: The Dance Resumes 106 3. Before Midnight: One Last Dance? 187 Preface Like the one between Celine and Jesse in Before Sunrise, some chance encounters are more fortunate than others. I didn't see Before Sunrise when it came to theaters in 1994--didn't even hear about it. Several years later, while channel surfing during a commercial break from a TV show I've long forgotten, I stumbled upon Richard Linklater's unusual romantic drama. As I joined them, Jesse and Celine were wandering through an amusement park in Vienna, gabbing about the practicality of romantic relationships and largely ignoring their surroundings. Intrigued, I never returned to the program I had been watching. Instead I joined Linklater's young couple on a conversational journey through the streets and alleys of modem day Vienna, discussing a wide variety of topics and getting to know one another. They agreed, they argued, they flirted with and tried to manipulate each other. They reacted to the sights and people they encountered, sometimes with conspiratorial glee and sometimes contrarily. They shared their private pasts, distant and recent. They occasionally grew bored with each other. They sought, avoided and again sought a romantic entanglement. They referred back to their own conversations, barely hours old. They made plans and promises, then went their separate ways, leaving the audience to decide their future. They did all of these things, and more, without being interrupted and distracted by the usual plot intrigues of romantic dramas and 1 2 comedies. Such intrigues make other movies exciting and memorable. Who can think of Casablanca's "fight for love and glory" without war-weary refugees and the battle for freedom against Nazi oppression, or North by Northwest without spies, duplicity and death-defying escapes? Before Sunrise never indulges in melodramatic diversions. We either engage emotionally with Celine and Jesse and their conversational marathon or we change the channel, DVD, Blu-ray or whatever format we're watching. The day after catching the second half of Before Sunrise on television, I purchased a VHS tape of the movie at a local video store and watched the entire film that night. I was hooked. Repeated encounters gave me a greater appreciation for the surprising twists and turns within the extended dialogs of Celine and Jesse. Before Sunrise became one ofmy favorite films. When a sequel, Before Sunset, arrived nearly a decade later, I was skeptical. Would the fictional illusion of a complicated intimacy fall apart from over-familiarity? No. Linklater, his co-writers and lead performers took into account nine years of separation between the two main characters and created a very different journey for them back to intimacy. Before Midnight did the same, throwing Jesse and Celine into an emotional cauldron of romantic, parental and career pressures accumulated over many years and finally erupting in a memorable battle of words worthy of George and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But as different as the Before movies are from each other, they form the unbreakable web of a romantic relationship from its youthful beginning to mid-life crisis, evoking an acute awareness of the passage of time and its challenges to sustaining passion. This book is a reflection of my fascination with the fictional odyssey of Jesse and Celine. It attempts to trace their conversational journey through a kaleidoscope of experience and 3 recollection, affection and resentment, passion and disillusionment. Theirs is an intriguing tango that's lasted for nearly twenty years and may not yet be finished, if its creators return to the same dance floor at some future time. Introduction: The Space Between Romance in Richard Linklater's film trilogy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Sunset, is an exercise in perpetual motion, with endless variations. A complicated series of dance steps touching on so many emotional nuances and never repeated in precisely the same way. There's physical attraction at first sight, awkward maneuvers to initiate an acquaintance, the exhilarating yet risky exploration of each other's private histories and opinions, competition to see whose history and opinions will define their future relations, inevitable misunderstandings, the invention of games to forge a solidarity or to express indirectly what cannot be stated openly, inevitable periods of boredom with each other, slips of the tongue resulting from a variety of causes, coincidental moments of good or bad luck that can either rescue or damage a relationship, and so much more. If the three Before movies were re-edited down to the length of a music video and set to music, the highlights of Celine and Jesse's romance might best be scored by a tango: something like Astor Piazzolla's "Lo Que Vendra," or perhaps Haris Alexiou's "Gia Ena Tango" from Before Midnight. One of the exciting things about these three films is that so much of what is often edited out of movie romances is left in. And because they contain very few extraneous plot developments to intrude on Celine and Jesse's intimate tango of love and hate, we can get very 4 5 close to the fictional illusion they create. There are no death threats, car chases, abductions, spy intrigues or natural disasters to obstruct our view of or re-shape their private interactions. Before Sunrise is the story of a one-night acquaintance and romance, yet it contains glimpses of many things explored in the two sequels. It sets the stage for what comes later, despite the fact that according to the writers, actors and director involved no sequels were planned while it was being made. Elements of attraction and conflict introduced in the first film recur throughout the next two, though seldom in identical form. Listen to dialog between the two main characters in Sunset and Midnight and you'll hear echoes of scenes and situations in Sunrise. The richness and subtlety of the 1994 original made the sequels worth filming--and they do not disappoint. Instead of merely trying to recapture the romantic freshness of Sunrise, Sunset builds itself on the bittersweet memory of events in Vienna, combined with tensions and experiences acquired by Celine and Jesse during the intervening nine years. Midnight takes the hopeful conclusion of Sunset and ruthlessly subjects it to nine years of the wear and tear of a long-term relationship, including divorce and children and careers, while retaining a nostalgic whiff of the excitement and passion of Vienna. The conversations between Celine and Jesse progress within each film and from film to film. For example, they are understandably tentative and cautious at the beginning of their acquaintance, on board a train headed for Vienna. Conversing at length in the lounge car, they grow more confident, less self-conscious, more revealing and daring. Yet when Jesse persuades Celine to get off the train and explore Vienna with him, they find themselves suddenly tongue tied again, too aware that their bold action has taken their brief acquaintance to a higher level of intimacy. That same shy hesitance returns later, in the listening booth of a record shop and on a 6 Ferris wheel, when they confront the prospects of romantic feelings and their first kiss, despite their comfortably easy banter between those moments of decision. Before Sunset begins similarly to Before Sunrise. Despite the intimacy they forged by the end of the first movie, Jesse and Celine must begin again as near-strangers, awkwardly renewing their acquaintance after a long separation. And this time they are burdened by a load of emotional baggage ( old memories of each other, an unexplained broken promise, intervening relationships with other people, careers, children, etc.) they did not carry on board that train to Vienna. Their movement towards renewed intimacy is complicated, sometimes sabotaged, by accumulated disappointment, frustration and resentment. Their pasts push them apart as much as it draws them together. In Before Sunrise it's only their past relationships with other people, rather than with each other, that helps shape their responses to each other, at least until they begin to create a shared past through successive conversations. Before Midnight is a whole new ball game for Jesse and Celine. The tentativeness between them is mostly gone. Nine years of being a couple and raising children has stripped away most of the polite formalities from their conversations and interactions. And they no longer occupy a conversational bubble, blissfully removed from the prying eyes and ears, the demands and meddling, of other people. On the contrary, during a dinner conversation while on vacation in Greece, they are more than willing to air out their dirty laundry in front of new acquaintances, even using those new friends to embarrass and hurt each other.