BEFORE SUNRISE
A film review by Jules N. Binoculas
Copyright 1995 Jules N. Binoculas
When Irish author James Joyce (1882-1941) chose to immortalize his first meeting with his wife Nora, he wrote ULYSSES, a dictionary-sized comic parody of Homer's ancient epic ODYSSEY--compressing the account of the 20-year wanderings of Odysseus into *one single day* in Dublin--preserving for world history, a menagerie of stray thoughts and actions from June 16, 1904.
Shortly thereafter, Joyce left Ireland with his then-to-be lifelong companion (and wrote all of his works in Italy, Paris, and Zurich)--vowing never to return to his homeland.
When Texas-bred Director Richard Linklater made his third film, BEFORE SUNRISE--about the events in a single-night's romance in Vienna--guess which date he chose to dramatize. And why not? If it didn't make any money, he'd be in good company.
There's a scene in Linklater's first film, SLACKER, where a character called PRODDER, reads from ULYSSES while inducing another man to throw a typewriter into a stream to cleanse himself from a woman's adultery:
"... If he had smiled, why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first ... last, only, and alone...."
In SLACKER and BEFORE SUNRISE, Linklater steals from literature to be cute. He realizes that transplanted cerebral ironies must be kept on ice to keep from spoiling--but he knows how to serve them fresh before they curdle. As one male protagonist points out (quoting another of Linklater's favorite philosophers): "All answers must be found in the attempt."
Once the director sells the idea that anything is possible--when everything is permitted--he's off to the races.
The races, however, turn out to be a partially disjointed quasi-enchanting escapade between two attractive, perceptive, and ingenuous travelers on their way to somewhere else.
Linklater drops so many cinematic and literary dollops into his stories, he risks putting his audience into mythic insulin shock. Yet miraculously, BEFORE SUNRISE is a nutritious entertainment: when all is said (and little done), you're ready to visit a bookstore, call your travel agent, and share your favorite libation with the next person who excites you. Life could be worse.
In SLACKER, the camera mirrored the queasy conscience of the audience, following dozens of superficially developed geeks in fuzzy epiphanies of mere drifting through lives with no future. So, if a "Slacker" is *all talk and no walk*, then "Before Sunrisers" are *mostly walk and endless talk*. But this talk is pleasantly contagious.
Like Homer, Linklater follows characters through dead-end episodes in strange places; and like Joyce, he bathes them in radiantly incidental banalities. But even a near-perfect night with someone new isn't always perfect: we're perpetually waiting for these whimsical, rambling, under-written souls to settle into more precise psychological subtext.
Yet, the viewer-friendly story never implodes, using informal inflections to trace a tenuous path around weird, pathetic, and ordinary locals on an ordinary night in Vienna.
Technically, the camera perspectives are inconsistent, but somehow interesting--dog-eared with low-budget technical flaws, redeemed with laid-back rhythms.
Despite its relentless emphasis on pure surface reality, BEFORE SUNRISE lingers resonantly in the mind--a curiously satisfying moment-to-moment adventure, peopled with uncertainty and awkwardness--signifying nothing-in-particular. But, that's the point. In the words of yet another nameless philosopher recruited for SLACKER: "... my loves, what are they now? But the more pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself."
Following boldly in the large footprints of his mentors, Mr. Linklater coolly alchemizes his literary conceits into a minor masterpiece of the mundane.
RATING 89/100
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