Nine years from now we will meet again

Their story already goes back some 18 years, to that night in Vienna, when Jesse (Ethan Hawke), an American, and Celine (Julie Delpy), a Frenchwoman, were just two wandering kids in their early 20s, soaking up the world, meeting perchance on a train, taking a dare to honour the connection both felt so acutely, to not let it simply slip away and wind up always wondering what might have become of the one that got away. 

That night was captured in Before Sunrise (1995), a perfectly lovely little film, but one that came to mean much, much more to me once I saw Before Sunset (2004), in which Jesse and Celine reunite in Paris on the occasion of Jesse’s book tour: his first novel was a fictionalized version of that night they met, maybe fell in love, and parted for nine years without any way of contacting each other. Now in their 30s, they wander the city of light, tell each other of what their lives have become; she’s single, and a somewhat domesticated activist, while he married, had a child, and became a writer, though the married part isn’t going so well. As with its predecessor, this most meaningful of sequels ends in a moment of heady suspension, in Celine’s apartment, with Celine dancing seductively to Nina Simone, and Jesse very much in danger of missing his flight home. (Does it make me a cynic or a romantic that when I last re-watched Before Sunrise, in preparation for seeing Before Midnight, I was suddenly struck by the feeling that the film may just depict the ideal relationship, one composed almost entirely of longing and projection?) If you’ve seen these films and were drawn deep into them as I was, you hardly need me to tell you about Before Midnight to convince you to see it. Read ahead if you wish, though you may want to let the film do the work of bringing you up to speed and come back to this review later.

Before Midnight begins with a farewell, not between our eternally returning lovers, but between Jesse and Hank, his now 13-year-old son, who is returning to Chicago and his mother, now divorced from Jesse, who did not catch that plane. In fact, he stayed, married Celine, and the couple, now in their 40s, have children of their own: angelic bilingual flaxen-haired twins. The family is vacationing in Greece, and while driving from the airport to the idyllic seaside house where they’re staying Jesse raises the possibility of their trying out the States for a while, just to be closer to Hank. Celine immediately pegs this suggestion as symptomatic of a bigger scheme of Jesse’s to avoid responsibilities to his current family, not to mention ignore the fact that she’s been offered an important government job that would keep her in Paris. Jesse’s seemingly innocent idea lays the seed of discontent that will grow into a potentially cataclysmic battle between a passive-aggressive husband and a more brazenly resentful wife. Some friends arrange to mind the kids so Jesse and Celine can run off to enjoy an interruption-free night of love in a nice hotel, but the chances of erotic fulfillment slowly erode as the couple make their way into town, exchanging some of the most unnervingly resonant dialogue between long-term lovers I’ve ever heard in in any film.

The script is a collaboration between Hawke, Delpy and director Richard Linklater, and this trilogy of films—along with a wonderful little Jesse and Celine cameo in Waking Life (2001)—will likely stand as the most enduring work in all of these artists’ respective legacies. There’s nothing in cinema history quite like it, though Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage (1973) and its follow-up Saraband (2005) come close, while as a stand-alone film Before Midnight perhaps most closely resembles Certified Copy (2010). The trilogy allows the actors to age and the story and characters to age with them, to ripen to the point where, wordy as these films are, so much is left unsaid. Before Midnight feels to me like the best of the three, but is it simply that I too have aged with Jesse and Celine, who are only a little older than me? That I see things gained and lost in my own life as I watch theirs unfold in nine-year wallop-increments?

Linklater elegantly lets Before Midnight’s five sections play out in long takes, adding to the sense of the real, to the earned intimacy and organic burgeoning of tension. As the film reaches its end, there are cups of tea left un-sipped, glasses of wine left un-drank, bodies left unloved, questions left unanswered. Again, that heady suspension, though now altered by so many unalterable life choices riddled with consequence. Will there be a fourth film? The door has been left open. But for now we get to live for a while with this one. 

             

Erland Josephson, 1923 - 2012

Sigh... Inevitable, the exact opposite of a shock—he was 88, after all—something I've been half waiting for since seeing his very changed, elderly figure in Saraband, but this is news that leaves me with a very heavy feeling nonetheless. What a body of work, one half of an infinitely rich collaboration, absolutely the fullest embodiment of Bergman's conception of modern middle-class masculinity, in all its weakness, wickedness and weary charisma. This was a face that represented a certain haunting ambivalence. He radiated uncertainty, the limits of repression, the persistence of desire, however inappropriate. The image above is from the work that most of us will most closely associate with Josephson: Scenes From a Marriage. Anyway, I'm at a bit of a loss. So here's Richard Brody at the New Yorker.

Liv Ullman at 70: a look back at Saraband

Liv Ullman turns 70 today. Her strangely angular, deeply sensual beauty; her tremendous presence even, perhaps especially, when silent; her worry, joy and wonder; her sometimes near-palpable warmth; her sometimes fearsome wrath: all of these qualities have kept me more or less spellbound since my teens, when I first saw her withhold words, incite confessions, and move ghostily toward that climactic merger of mind and spirit in Persona (1966) . 

She's truly one of the greatest of them all, and nearly as formidable a director as she is an actress. She's all the more admirable, too, for her ardent humanitarian work, though the greedy movielover in me would like nothing more than to see her return far more often to the screen, where she still radiates so much emotional texture, more so, in fact, with the force of familiarity. For this reason I figured I'd mark the occasion by posting my review of her final performance for her great collaborator and one-time husband, the late Ingmar Bergman. I wrote the piece before Bergman's death, not to mention that of cinematographer Sven Nykvist's, and have left references to the artists' former status among the living as is. 

Ullman's Norwegian, I realize, but since she's most familiar to us in Swedish, I'll opt to say på födelsedagen!

In the realm of art, the inextricable conspiracy between mortality and the photographic image is probably made most palpable and immediate in our relationship to seeing actors age in film. Watch a retrospective of any actor with a long, prolific career, and you soon notice that the way time makes its mark upon that actor causes the work to resonate more deeply. The almost spectral, larger-than-life presence becomes fused with the gradually dispersed pieces of evidence that reveal the all-too-human vulnerability to time’s passage. This betrayal of the myth of youth in the movies is one of the phenomena that make the medium uniquely powerful.

The mere illusion of time’s passage was one of the pivotal elements in our relationship to the characters in Ingmar Bergman’s 1973 television series Scenes From a Marriage. Over six episodes, Marianne (Liv Ullman) and Johan (Erland Josephson) endure the most tumultuous years of their relationship, finally winding up in, perhaps, their last embrace that literally seems to exist outside of time and the laws that govern every other part of their ultimately separate lives. The illusion is masterfully created through the intimate collaboration between Bergman, cinematographer Sven Nykvist and the two main actors, already familiar to viewers from previous roles in several prominent Bergman films, and the result is extremely moving.

But with Saraband (2003), also made for television and which Bergman has announced as his final work, time is no longer an illusion: Ullman and Josephson really are 30 years older now and their age is not only noticeable but an intrinsic feature in the affectionate but no less unwavering gaze of Bergman’s camera. What’s impressive about this is not simply that we, for example, notice the disquieting involuntary tremor in Josephson’s hands (he’s 82), but that he and Ullman, two of the world’s most accomplished living actors, have somehow managed to completely integrate their own ageing process with those of their characters. As with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy’s characters in Before Sunset (04), the actors have managed to, with utterly convincing nuance, evoke the same characters they played previously and to do so in a way that manages to account for all the messy life these characters have lived in the interim. What’s more, they make it look organic and easy.

Bergman, however, is not revisiting a previous incarnation but simply delivering the work he’s compelled to at this stage, breaking away from nearly all of the conventions of Scenes that don’t suit his current temperament. Nothing stinks of excess sentimentality or gimmickry here (aside perhaps from a slightly winky reference to 1968's Hour of the Wolf early in the film), but it’s played out like business as usual in the pared-down aesthetic characteristic of all Bergman’s television work undertaken after his last cinematic feature, 1982’s Fanny and Alexander. It begins, rather disarmingly, with Marianne addressing us directly, looking through old photos, giving a brief recap of her perfectly ordinary life since Scenes, and explaining the impulse to end her 30-year estrangement from Johan that sets Saraband in motion.

Marianne and Johan’s reunion anchors Saraband, but, wisely, it’s not made the whole of the film’s content. In fact, the more dramatic conflict isn’t between those two at all but between Johan’s son Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt) and his daughter Karin (Julia Dufvenius), both of them cellists living off Johan’s considerable wealth and alongside the phantom of Karin’s long-deceased mother, who remains as beloved to all involved as Henrik is resented. The complicated, tormented (and clearly incestuous) nature of the relationship between Henrik and Karin certainly complies with the intense skepticism of family values that informed Scenes, but is offset by Karin’s youthful luminosity in a superb performance that implies the fruitful collaboration Dufvenius and Bergman might have shared if her career wasn’t just starting as his apparently reaches its end.

As observed in Time Out’s review, Saraband is “less a sequel than an expansive coda,” and while the psychodrama plays itself out in the foreground, the story of Marianne and Johan quietly re-blooms and then fades before once again becoming some densely potent image in their past. The reconfirmation of their love isn’t a magical remembering and correcting of love, as in movies like Random Harvest (1942), but a reminder of the genuine enigma of a love that cannot be managed. The combined effect of seeing both Scenes and Saraband leads us to the notion that while we’re helpless to control or predict the sudden shifts of love, we must stay attuned to that voice within us that might some day compel us to just reach out toward others regardless of what may happen. In short, it urges us to not let time just slip away.