Review of Before Sunrise (1933) by Hew R — 04 Sep 2013

Before Sunrise is charming and aspirational but also empty and shallow. Essentially the film consists of a couple whispering sweet nothings to each other, for 110 on screen minutes, against the background of a summer's evening in Vienna. It's an unrealistic, self-indulgent, middle-class wet dream about spontaneous love and the differences between men and women.

Hawke and Delpy are good and share a great chemistry together. They also accurately induce all the right feelings of awkwardness, excitement and mystery that one would hope for with this kind of romance. Their characters however, although endearing, are far too agreeable. This is how I'd imagine Michael McIntyre talking about love. Throughout the film they relentlessly discuss the most common denominators of western perceptions of romance, in an attempt to tap into the audience's fantasies. Apart from this making one feel rather queasy, it also comes across as lazy. It means that the characters don't have any opinions or feelings that are specific to themselves; their intimacy, which is smeared on screen throughout, is simply an embodiment of how the audience and popular culture as a whole like to fantasize about love. They add nothing original therefore undermining all ideas of spontaneity and romance, i.e. the premise of the film.

The plot is made up entirely of dialogue and to his credit Linklater's writing oozes wit and naturalism; the problem is it lacks anything else. I felt like I was third wheeling the most introverted couple in Europe, while they stared into each others glazed over expressions, sharing in-jokes and irrelevant digressing stories about some guy or some girl back in Paris or Madrid. It was like a sushi bar where the same things come round and round and round on the conveyor-belt in front of you and the only difference is that on every circuit the food is a little less fresh; a little less appetizing. I'm amazed they've made a trilogy out of this. By the end of the film I was dying for something sleazy or bitchy; something realistic that didn't alienate me and make me feel like a romantic waste land.

Because that's the reality. Most of us don't know what it's like to meet someone on a train and fall in love instantly and to spend the perfect night in Vienna, where nothing goes wrong. Surely spontaneity is all about the risk of things going wrong? Otherwise what makes one feel so reckless and excited? We all know what it's like to meet a guy/girl on a night out in Sinners and have an appalling one night stand with someone simply awful. That's reality; that's spontaneity.

Maybe I'm cynical, which is depressing as I'm only 21 and I'm sure this kind of film is meant to be targeted at my demographic. And as I always say, the whole point of recording a story, fictional or not, is that it transcends the mundaneness of the everyday and therefore should not have to worry about reality. There wouldn't be a story if they just shared a quick awkward glance from across the train carriage and then went on with their day-to-day lives. All the same, I just felt that all my shallowest, most pseudo-intellectual, pop-philosophical conceptions were being targeted in on and vigorously massaged throughout the whole ordeal.

As I said at the beginning it's empty and shallow, but the worst aspect of it all is that it tries, using a façade of romanticism and European culture, to convince us that it's the exact opposite.