2010 is a long way from 1994.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are two extraordinarily beautiful young people who fall in love in Vienna, an extraordinarily beautiful city. Both are earnest bourgeois bohemians. And they meet in that most romantic of places, a train hurtling through continental Europe.
The film opens with Jesse, Ethan Hawke’s character, reading a book on a train. A middle-aged couple is arguing loudly in German, a language tailor-made for loud, ugly exchanges. So Jesse moves to a quieter part of the train, where he spies Julie Delpy’s character, the gorgeous but sensitive Celine, reading a book by Georges Bataille, indicating that as well as being gorgeous and sensitive, she’s smart, too.
They introduce themselves. She’s French, a student at the Sorbonne, returning from a visit with her grandmother in Budapest. He’s an American from Texas, bumming around on a Euro-rail pass after a breakup with his girlfriend in Spain.
Jesse tells a story about a theory that middle-aged couples stop hearing each other, because as they age, men lose hearing in the high frequencies, and women lose hearing in the low frequencies.
The story serves as an opener to some really earnest conversation, typical blind-date talk.
Then Jesse makes his pitch. He wants Celine to get off the train with him in Vienna and bum around the city for the night. Jesse doesn’t have money for a hotel room, and he has a cheap flight back to the states leaving from Vienna in the morning.
Jesse has some serious mack-daddy charm, because she buys it, and agrees to spend the night with him knocking around Vienna.
They float around Vienna, which is a friendly, mildly exotic place, full of mildly exotic, yet harmless and friendly people, and engage in a lot of friendly, earnest blind-date chatter all the while.
Oh, and by the way, it’s June 16 – Bloomsday — which adds a patina of undergraduate literary charm to the undertaking.
They don’t fall into each other’s arms immediately though. Their first kiss is reserved for an enclosed ferris wheel car that looks to be the twin of the one in which the incomparable Orson Welles coolly waxes misanthropic as the charming and villainous Harry Lyme. Is this ferris wheel, having been soiled by unspeakable evil, thus Redeemed By True Love?
They finally bump uglies in the park, after a bottle of wine cadged (improbably) from a bartender who, Blinded By The Power Of True Love, accepts an earnest promise from Jesse that, if the barkeep should be so kind as to provide a bottle of wine today, he will gladly pay on Tuesday.
Looking scarcely rumpled, and none the worse for wear, despite being up all night on the streets in a major city, they part when Celine gets back on the train for Paris that morning, both promising to meet there again in six months.
To paraphrase Celine, this is an archetypal college-boy guy-fantasy, albeit the genteel liberal-arts version …. meet a gorgeous French girl with good teeth on a European train, fuck her on a blanket in a Vienna park, and never see her again. And what shy, sensitive college girl wouldn’t want to be a hot French girl like Celine taking a flyer with a handsome, sweet-talking American, who she could fuck on a blanket in the park, and never see again?
I avoided this film for years because I had it pegged as a first-date flick for the middlebrow art cinema crowd. Then somehow Netflix put it in the mailbox. I didn’t even know that Linklater directed it until we sat down to watch it.
Well I was right. This was a boring bit of fluff, predictable post-college twenty-something fantasy pap in a gorgeous wrapper. What beats me is why this went over so well when it came out in 1994. Krysztof Kieslowski’s ‘White’ and Roger Avary’s ‘Killing Zoe’ were also from 1994, and both were far better films than this one. Julie Delpy looked just as good in these films, too. Yet I don’t recall these better films getting even half the press, if that. And I’ve probably sat through the ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Before Sunset’ trailers a hundred times or more at various theaters over the past 15 years.
While initial reviews of this film were overwhelmingly positive, more recent reviews, not so much. The film seems impossibly trite and innocent now. Of course, 1994 was a trite and innocent time, compared to now. If the film were made today, Jesse and Celine would meet on a Greyhound from Portland. He’s newly homeless and heading to Pittsburgh to spend a weekend with his brother before reporting to Army Basic Training. She is a pretty hispanic girl on the run from her homicidal Guatemalan gang-boss boyfriend and his posse of machete-wielding thugs. She’s on her way to Cleveland to catch another Greyhound south to New Orleans where she plans to make big bucks as a server in the new French Quarter Theme Park. The Greyhound breaks down in Detroit, where they’re forced to spend the night. They are beaten and robbed. A meth dealer sees them as a Light of True Love and fronts them a bag, which they do up. They fuck all night in a public restroom. They vow to meet in six months, in the same bus terminal bathroom.
In the sequel, they meet in the same bus station nine years later. He’s on his way to military prison, and she’s mopping the floors. They are thrown beneath the wheels of a bus by the meth dealer, who is still waiting to get paid for that bag.
