Tom Shone expands on his glowing praise for Richard Linklater’s trilogy – Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and the recently-released Before Midnight:
If asked to provide a list of great American achievements over the past 20 years, I would say the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the iPhone and the speech with which Jesse [Ethan Hawke] first talks Céline [Julie Delpy] off the train in “Before Sunrise“. It had to do with time travellers, as I recall, but it was the tone that did it—a small miracle of foxy charm and open-hearted entreaty, whisked along by a Huck Finn boulevardier spirit. It turned out to be enough to power an entire movie. Make that three.
Shone speaks of a “third character” in the films – Time:
It has long been an obsession of Linklater’s, going back to his first film, “Slacker” (1991), and one he shares with his fellow indie alumnus Tarantino. It makes you wonder what they were putting in the coffee at Sundance in 1994 that caused all the film-makers of their generation to launch far-reaching investigations into the nature of time and narrative. Where Tarantino in “Pulp Fiction” bent chronology to his own ends like a magician constructing an animal with balloons, Linklater, by both temperament and theme, went with the flow, setting in motion a series that would turn out to record nothing less than the wear and tear of time on love’s young dream. … [T]he Céline and Jesse films will be held up as classics of the heartfelt sequel form, up there with Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel films, Satyajit Ray’s Apu films and the “Toy Story” trilogy.
Previous Dish on Before Midnight here.
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