6 months on

Before Sunset

"Last night. Okay. Six months from last night. December sixteenth, six o'clock in the evening, track eleven. It's a train ride for you, but I got to fly over. But hey, I'll be here." - Jesse, in Before Sunrise
So, it's December 16 - which is the date the lovers were supposed to have met, 6 months later, by the end of Before Sunrise. And, totally unplanned, I spent part of today reading my newly-acquired screenplays for Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, which I suspect is one of the wisest films on relationships ever made. Before Sunset is optimistic in the best of all ways: knowing about the ravages of time, knowing about constraints, knowing about all the flaws in each other and still the lovers continue their conversations, this time knowing what a precious thing they had years ago, and then come the extraordinary, intense scenes at the end where Celine and Jesse discuss their respective troubled relationships...

While I thought Before Sunrise was a great film, Before Sunset truly took my breath away - one of those films where I just sat at the end, watching the credits roll, trying to take it all in.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Ah yes. Sunset was so much more grown-up and heartwrenching and that made it all the more wonderfully intense. Someday I want to re-watch them back to back.
19 December 2005 at 08:46
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Verbal agreement

From a Grauniad Guardian article on James Dyson , inventor of the dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner: He still has one major ambition. To become a verb, in the same way that Hoover - or, as he puts it, "the alternative" - has done. I suggest to him that people are already using his product but still saying they are "hoovering". He smiles. "I don't think they'll be doing that for long," he says. That struck me as unusual - it's very rare for a firm's leader to say that he wants his product to become a verb. Lots of other companies like TiVo and Google have tried desperately to avoid their name becoming a verb, for fear of the name becoming so generic that the trademark gets diluted. But then, the Languagehat archives seem to show (see comment near the bottom) that Dyson's big on turning his name into a verb. *** Sadly, due to its distinct lack of vowels, the chances of "sng" becoming a verb seem close to zero, regardless of whate...
Read more

50 Cent's crib

This New York Times article on 50 Cent's life in the sleepy suburb of Farmington, Conn. , is quite wry - But a cook at China Palace said Mr. Jackson could save 10 percent on any order over $30... Ah, the privileges of fame... 10% off Chinese takeout! For the party, Mr. Jackson ordered more than $5,000 worth of liquor, including "a lot of Baccardi," according to the owner of a Farmington liquor store who spoke on the condition of anonymity "to protect his privacy." Sipping Bacardi (ooh, caught a Times misspelling) like it's his birthday. How anonymous could a liquor store owner in a suburban town be? It's not like there're hundreds of liquor stores in the town, I'm guessing. I like how they keep referring to him as Mr. Jackson...
Read more