3.12.14

"Before Sunset" (2004) by Richard Linklater


Richard Linklater and his friends created something quite unique and made unforgettable piece of art that works as our collective memory. That it took so many years and troubles with finding finances to actually put this all together is mind-boggling because it seems that any old & tired flick with car crashes and explosions can get funds but this - masterpiece with adult people living real lives and dealing with tears and disappointment - had to wait forever. Maybe its even better this way, because the script got polished to perfection and it was obviously labour of love for everybody involved. We are not the only ones who took "Before Sunrise" to our hearts - actors themselves wrote their lines, along with Kim Krizan and director.

It is not and it can never be like "Before Sunrise" because that was unforgettable first love that happens only once, when hearts are still young and trembling. Characters are older now but we helplessly root for them, understanding what effect their chance meeting had on their lives and how it affected them. To accept that they are now different-but-still-same-inside is to accept that life changes all of us in the same way. If freshness and bloom of the first youth is forever gone, so be it, scars of time are unavoidable and look what we gained along the way. Again I found myself thinking about my own life and meetings with old loves, how shy, clumsy and full of reproach they were. 

Ethan Hawke and Julie Deply are fantastic - under her neuroses and his quiet resignation there is so much unsaid and sometimes I thought that we are following two lines of dialogues, what has been said out loud and what their gestures and eyes expressed. This is now the pure magic of cinema where we can't distinguish anymore between what is real and what is acting. I honestly don't remember when was the last time when I cared so much for movie characters. The ending is just perfect. 

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