Before Sunset – dir.Richard Linklater, 2004

I like this film so immensely because of how it ends. It’s a Kaiser Soze-type humdinger of a thing.  Yet when you see it, so gentle and subtle is it, that it could easily pass you by, which is a testament to both the script and the acting.  The film dissolves, like sherbet on the tongue.  It so perfectly ends, that I wonder how a film and its prequel (Before Sunrise) could precede it.  Thankfully the film itself is filled with similarly glorious moments. In the back of a taxi, Celine (Julie Delpy) raises her hand to affectionately touch Jesse (Hawke), who mid rant and sitting slightly forward, is none the wiser, Celine thinks twice though, and swiftly retracts the gesture, putting her arm back down again.  It seems such a strange action to witness and yet is a perfectly beautiful depiction of amorous trepidation and neurosis, and from then on we read Celine entirely more clearly.  We feel sorry for Jesse not knowing that for a moment there she wanted to be tender. The film itself is a testimony to what is not done, and what hasn’t happened.  The two never successfully reunited ten years before, and though there are frissons between the two in Paris, they are not acted on, as Jesse is married, it would have been too crass and torrid to dirty this fine romance with betrayal.  The film is about Jesse’s moment with Celine, it is hurried, he has a plane to catch; a metaphor perhaps for the distance in time and space between them and a hark back to their first meeting on a train. Their relationship is a pacing fleeting one, never unhurried, never leisurely.  The element of time adds restlessness and desperation, they only have so long to say or not say everything they have wanted to for years. Both, at points, in between long soliloquies about their lives spent, find it difficult not to orally buckle under the pressure. The film is a private moment played out in a public space, the streets of Paris, until it finally becomes a private one, Celine’s flat, where she, in song, admits that it was always Jesse. The Parisian sun seems to make Celine glow like some golden statue, she hasn’t changed Jesse says, maybe a little thinner, but you know she turned out exactly how he had hoped her to.  Jesse had better stop musing over her or he’s going to miss that Plane.  The most agonizing part of their story is when this pair, with no means of contact, recounts how close they were to meeting again all along.  Both lived in New York City for a while at the same time. Jesse on the way to his wedding, to what would be a loveless marriage, thought he saw her once.  Did he or didn’t he? Was it a tormenting apparition to cold feet or a tantalising coincidence?  She used to live near there she tells him. What is excruciating becomes the most romantic thing of all, but only because they found each other again.  If they hadn’t it would have been another saddest story in the world.

★★★★★

Hannah and Her Sisters – dir.Woody Allen, 1986

Woody Allen never wants you to forget this film.  So he made it perfect. Hannah (Mia Farrow) and her sisters, Lee (Barbara Hershey) and Holly (Diane Wiest) are ostensibly Allen’s version of the three Graces, but with New York City spin.  We know he likes the Greeks, because of the short, Oedipus Wrecks in New York Stories, and Mighty Aphrodite, not just rubric but literal affiliations with the Greek myths.  The tragedy and the melodrama, work with his neurotic pace, after all it was he who wrote; ‘comedy is tragedy plus timing.’ The sisters bestow both similarities, and dialectical opposition, to the graces. Between them the sisters have foibles and kindnesses, cavernous weaknesses and virtues, carved like sculptured alabaster that lets the light bounce off to let the muscles and veins and the reality of human life come through.  Allen explores the virtuosity of women by dichotomising them against a plethora of useless men.  Though Holly may preliminarily be flawed and misguided, with a cocaine addiction and most unforgivably for her sisters, an irksome lack of direction, it is ultimately concluded that it was a struggle she had to undertake to realise her creative ambition. Lee has perhaps the most questionable moral conduct with an adulterous affair with Elliott (Michael Caine) Hannah’s husband, but this is explicable in that we are somehow not led to pour scorn on her betrayal but to empathise with her unhappiness and general ennui.  As for Elliott, a thinly disguised Anglo-Allen he may be, but there is certainly much there to ridicule in his actions and near creepy amorous obsession with Lee.  The film never loses consciousness of its integrity and it never becomes an either-or piece, neither wholly drama, romance, or comedy.   The film reflects the hourglass of life, the tragi-comedy, some of us encased in separate ends, none knowing when is the turn.  The film is sheer glory, and knows it itself. The existential crisis of Mickey (Allen) is lifted on a cinema visit to see the Marx Brother’s Duck Soup, which is a bit like what this film does, it lets you know you should hold on.

★★★★★