Here I am writing twice in recent weeks about the problem of character in writing & then I sit down to watch Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset, just possibly the most character-centric motion picture I’ve ever seen. The film, a sequel to Linklater’s 1995 Before Sunrise, just took the “best film” award in the sixth annual Village Voice film critics’ poll, finishing well ahead of the runner up, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, another film that asks all kinds of questions about the construction of Self, capital S, in life as well as in art.

 

The premise of Before Sunrise was that Jesse, a young American played by Ethan Hawke, meets a young French woman, Celine, played by Julie Delpy, on the train to Vienna & they hit it off instantly. Jesse had gone to Europe to be with his girlfriend only to be dumped on Day One & since then has ridden around on a Eurail Pass. His plane back to America is at 9 AM tomorrow and since he doesn’t have enough money left to pay for a room for the night, his plan has been to just wander the streets of Vienna until it’s time to catch the plane. He talks Celine, on her way back to Paris after visiting her grandmother in Hungary, into joining him for this little adventure.

 

That film is all about the connection people can make in the first moments of a relationship, heightened by the teasing anticipation of what sex will be like. During the film, they make a conscious decision not to fuck & tho there are some edits later in the film during which sex could have occurred, Before Sunrise is very careful never to let us imagine the aftermath of revelation such an act entails. As a film, it’s a delightful little bon-bon of romance.

 

Before Sunset again focuses on the same characters. It is nine years later and Jesse, having written a moderately successful novel about an event in which a young man & young woman meet on the train to Vienna is literally on a book tour, talking with a gaggle of a dozen or so readers at an event at Shakespeare & Company in Paris. One of the readers presses him on whether or not such a young woman ever existed “in real life” & Jesse sidesteps the question. As he does, he looks off to one side down an aisle of books and there she is!

 

At one level, you can almost write the rest of this movie yourself. At another, however, and this is what I find so intriguing thinking back on it a day later, Linklater’s allowed the characters themselves to decide what comes next. Literally, Delpy & Hawke took responsibility for the evolution of their characters along with Linklater and his original collaborator Kim Krizan. The collaborators had been talking about a sequel for some time – the original film ended on an ambiguous, open note – and were taking turns writing out little scenes, story ideas, and the like, trading emails, when Delpy came up with “40 pages of dialog” on a single pass & set the wheels in motion at last for the new film. Thus it was Delpy, who had imagined becoming an activist when she was younger – she’s been acting in films since she was nine – who decided that Celine should have an M.A. in political science & be working with “Green Cross,” an international organization that takes on everything from water purification projects in India to land mines as issues.

 

This whole motion picture might have been called My Cup of Coffee with Celine in that it’s all dialog, including some extraordinary “walk-and-talk” scenes that wend through the streets of Paris & one eight-minute single shot sequence in the back of the car that’s supposed to be taking Jesse to the airport for his plane back to the U.S. Far more compacted in time than the first film – it amounts to an hour or two at the most – the film contemplates even further concentration. In the bookstore, someone asks Jesse what he’s going to write next and he describes a novel that would occur entirely during the course of a single rock-&-roll song (it’s virtually a parody of Susan Minot’s Rapture, except that Jesse’s book project sounds rather as if it has more depth).

 

I’m not going to throw out more spoilers than I have other than to say Before Sunset is remarkably believable as a slice-of-life piece of cinema & that we get to see the full range of conceivable motions between Jesse & Celine over a very short period of time. Especially powerful is the moment when Celine makes clear to Jesse how really upsetting it has been to read her life in his book. Even more telling is how different their memories are of the original night in Vienna – and we’re not talking minor differences, either.

 

What here is character? Consistent story line, deft acting performances, continual references to a large set of schema all of which reinforce the “cosmic” tale of two lives of which these films are, after all, just two moments? It’s not as if these films are entirely without their seams (How many authors of even modestly successful first novels get sent out on ten-city book tours of Europe, especially if Shakespeare & Co. is one of the stops?), but overall the two movies celebrate subtlety & the idea of character as itself enough of a reason to watch a motion picture.

 

It’s enough to make me want to see Linklater’s next project, A Scanner Darkly, with Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey, Jr. & Winona Ryder – that’s a serious E! True Hollywood Story cast there – based on one of Philip K. Dick’s best novels – and a project already controversial for the decision to drop Charlie (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind) Kaufman’s screenplay. One can hardly imagine two more different sensibilities in today’s cinema than Linklater & Kaufman. Scanner is scheduled to open next September. Linklater’s project after that? Literally, a remake of The Bad News Bears.