“The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world.” But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: “O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time…. “O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed.”
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The narratives in more than half of Linklater’s ten features take place within the span of a day. I can’t remember if this is true of his unreleased first feature, the Super-8 It’s Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988), though I suspect it isn’t; I’m not sure about his animated Waking Life either. Time isn’t compressed in his two studio productions, The Newton Boys (1998) and The School of Rock (2003). But it is in Slacker (1991), Dazed and Confused (1993), Before Sunrise (1995), SubUrbia (1997), Tape (2001), and now Before Sunset, an inspired sequel to Before Sunrise.
The day in question is June 16, sometimes known as Bloomsday, during which the entire action of Ulysses is set. Before Sunrise isn’t an especially literary movie—even though Celine is reading Georges Bataille when they meet, Jesse quotes some lines from the above Auden poem shortly before they part, and Joyce’s English translation of Gerhard Hauptmann’s first play, published posthumously in 1978, is titled Before Sunrise. I suspect that Linklater uses the Ulysses reference because, like Joyce, he’s interested in giving a lot of weight to the everyday.
But it would be wrong to view the second film’s style as simply a continuation of that of the first. Before Sunset, shot in only 15 days, deliberately sets out to complement its predecessor right from the opening credits. During the final stretches of Before Sunrise we see a succession of places in Vienna where Celine and Jesse have spent time together in the order in which we first saw them, though neither character is present; it’s a kind of melancholy scrapbook. Reversing this process, Before Sunset begins with some of the Paris locations where Celine and Jesse will spend time together, in this case tracing their steps backward.
Directed by Richard Linklater
Written by Linklater, Kim Krizan, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke
With Delpy and Hawke.
