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#celine x jesse
realzayn · 2 years
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admireforever · 1 year
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Before Sunset
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innocte · 10 months
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Before Sunrise (1995)
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missethanhawke · 10 months
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sundanceorg - On June 16, 1994, Jesse met Céline on a train from Budapest. Today is their anniversary. 🥺
(Ethan sharing the posts to his IG stories part 5!)
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bestoftweets · 1 year
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fishyyyyy99 · 8 months
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Before Sunrise is one of my favourite movies ever, and I think the Before Trilogy is brilliant as a whole. And this one particular quote from Before Midnight always felt Ben and Devi-coded to me:
"But I, accept the whole package, the crazy and the brilliant. I know you're not gonna change and I don't want you to. It's called accepting you for being you."
*Not to be taken too literally. I don't think Ben and Devi will stay the exact same people as they grow older (but then neither did Jesse or Celine).
I like that a quote from one of my favourite fictional couples applies to another of my favourite fictional couples.
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nerdside · 1 year
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BEFORE SUNRISE (1995)
dir. Richard Linklater
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aaristea · 1 year
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I just rewatched Before Sunrise (1995), so here are some reasons of why I am obsessing over it:
The way the movie is shot. Random shots of Vienna's buildings. "Meaningless" shots of strangers speaking foreign languages at a bar. Random shots of people dancing and playing instruments, or an old lady walking at the park. A poet writing and smoking near a river. It feels so special.
There isn't really a plot. Usually, movies have plots that are helped forward by conversations, but in this one the conversation between them is the plot. They talk to each other for the entirety of the movie, bringing up a bunch of different topics and views on life. Death, love, purpose, birth, stars, fate. Monkeys. Friends. The horoscope. It gets super random.
The conversations seem so REAL. I feel like I'm spying on two strangers talking; it really doesn't feel like a movie. Especially not a cheesy romcom.
Again, the conversations are really really deep, like ones you'd have with a friend at 3am at the beach. But it's way more special, cause they're strangers, so they don't care about being judged by the other and the topics get weirder and deeper as the movie goes on.
There are no sex scenes. Need I say more? okay they do makeout BUT there are no embarassing sex scenes. the plot stands on its own. doesn't need a sex scene.
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The ending (maybe a bit of a spoiler so if you're planning on watching don't read here). We are left not knowing if they meet again or not, and I think it says a lot about the watcher. Someone could think that the two absolutely will meet again. Someone else could think there's no way, that was totally an empty promise. I worded it weirdly but, the point is you can be hopeful, delusional, realistic, hopeless, you can believe, and you can also not believe. That's the magic.
Young Ethan Hawke. That's it, that's a point on its own.
I kinda relate to Celine/Julie Delpy, she's amazing.
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guzgecesi · 1 year
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madeleineengland · 10 months
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On this day in 1994, Jesse and Céline meet on a train from Budapest to Vienna. 🚆💞 #June16th
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inthisdarktime · 2 months
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I cannot wait to make these triology posts but with Wilmon.
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realzayn · 2 years
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admireforever · 1 year
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Before Midnight
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innocte · 5 months
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Before Trilogy
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missethanhawke · 10 months
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criterioncollection -❣️🗓️ ❣️ Celine and Jesse day.
(Ethan sharing the posts to his IG stories part 4!)
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holden-norgorov · 9 months
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An Apologia to BEFORE MIDNIGHT (2013)
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I've just finished rewatching for the umpteenth time the spectacular work of art that is The Before Trilogy, and since I've discovered it I have always refrained myself from writing about it because of my inability to put into words the beauty and the depth behind the meaning that these three films have progressively acquired for me.
But this time I'm going to try to say something for the sake of those who believe the screenplay to have failed in portraying Jesse and Celine’s personalities and gone out of character in this third installment – which I feel particularly compelled to defend as it's, in my opinion, not only the best entry in the trilogy, but also one of the best movies ever made, significantly thanks to the way the couple's characterization brilliantly builds up on two-decades of long cinematic work and collaborative effort and climaxes with an egregious payoff. I hope that reading about how I interpret the way Before Midnight blends in perfect harmony with Before Sunrise and Before Sunset may at least partially redeem the film for those of you who were left dissatisfied or disappointed by the decrease in naive idealism and dream-like romance.
WARNING: Detailed spoilers of all three movies under the cut.
Even though I think it’s quite easy at first to find a bit jarring the evident, apparently sudden change in Jesse and Celine's dynamic – reacting with a kind of discomfort that is clearly something the screenplay wants to induce in the audience, which is not accostumed to revisit Jesse and Celine after they have spent almost a decade together and studying each other inside out – I also think it quickly becomes clear that what Before Midnight aims to do, with regards to characterization, is to take all the most irritating and unpleasant shades Jesse and Celine had always had within themselves, whose seeds were planted and indeed palpable, albeit romanticized, in Sunrise (despite both characters trying their best to keep them hidden beneath a deeply self-conscious need to foster the spark of their newfound connection and perform the attraction/seduction role-play) and aptly watered in Sunset, and throw them full-force to the viewers’ face, challenging their ability to still feel invested in the couple by appealing to the idea that even our favorite, most beloved people in the world can intimately be ugly, paradoxical, occasionally toxic as well as endearing at the same time, because that’s a hard truth about human nature and “this is real life, it’s not perfect but it’s real”.
To demonstrate that their characterization is actually coherent with everything that came before, I challenge you to think about Jesse and Celine in these terms: Sunrise makes it clear that they are both smart college graduates, fundamentally contemplative and opinionated intellectuals (or at least, proto-intellectuals) who share a hardwired desire to shape the world around them with their thoughts and ideas and an idealist outlook on the universe, time and the human condition. The trilogy explores, among other things, the way they react to the realization that the universe, time and the human condition can’t conform to their idealistic vision, but that they themselves have to find out how to conform to the universe, time and the human condition. What deeply sets Jesse and Celine apart, then, is the direction they decide to channel the resentment and deep-seated unfulfilling dread steaming from this bitter realization towards.
Jesse directs it towards himself, which turns him into a depressed writer who is never going to be satisfied no matter what happens into his life. In Sunset, the movie starts with Jesse talking about how everything is autobiographical and proceeding to announce the concept of his next book, which happens to feature a totally depressed guy whose dream is riding motorcycles trough South America, being a lover and adventurer who finds happiness “in the doing, not getting what he wants”, but who is instead “sitting at a marble table, eating lobsters with a beautiful wife and everything that he needs”. Later on, at the Parisian café, Jesse rants about being unable to be “in the moment”, about not enjoying any minute of his best-selling book tour and about how Buddhists may have a point when they talk about freeing themselves from desire – which Celine aptly identifies as a symptom of depression. And while Sunset seems to want to make you think that Jesse’s depression may stem from his unsatisfying family life, even hinting at the idea that Celine may be the cure to his condition, Midnight slaps you hard in the face and awakens you to the reality that even though Jesse did get what he wanted, he’s still more depressed than ever – in fact, it clarifies that Jesse’s depression is existential. Celine herself outwardly calls him out on it after he relates an anecdote about the twins fighting over a trampoline, when he refers to pettiness, jealousy and selfishness as “the natural human state”. He seems to quickly scrape her comment off in the moment as one of her exaggerations, but later on admits to his accuracy when he tells her, in the last scene of the movie, that he has struggled all his life connecting and being present with those he loves the most. Which brings us back to Sunrise and his confession about being an unwanted, neglected child who eventually kind of adjusted and took pride in viewing the world as “this place where I wasn’t meant to be”, or to the acknowledgement that he is sick of experiencing his life from his own point of view (“see, I’ve heard all these stories, so of course I’m sick of myself”). I truly believe, during the car ride at the beginning of Midnight, that Jesse is thinking about the same words of his father’s that he was confessing to Celine in Sunrise, when he says, talking about his own absence from his son’s life, “This is the one thing I promised myself I was never going to do, and now I look up and I’m doing it”. I really think it often goes underappreciated how tragic Jesse’s character actually is. The point of his character is that his own childhood abandonment trauma colored his conception and experience of the world, and about how that adds up to his intellectual inability to find peace and contentment in the moment, and about how both aspects flow into apparently inescapable patterns of self-repeated misery. He’s not just depressed: he’s doomed to depression. And the truth the movie points to is that, ultimately, Celine can’t change this foundational aspect of Jesse’s nature. She has, to an extent, to learn to live with it and accept it.
On the other hand, the same intellectual resentment and unfulfilling dread that Jesse directs within himself, Celine aggressively projects to the outside world. If Jesse is fundamentally depressed, Celine is fundamentally angry. Sunrise does a masterful job at carefully planting the seeds that testify how Celine is, at her core, defined by her anger, while simultaneously never allowing for that anger to truly come to the surface and take the audience out of the otherworldly romantic idealism of their night in Vienna. She talks about the unfairness of being unable to complain to nice and supporting parents; she says that everything pisses her off and proceeds to list several examples; she thinks it’s a healthy process to rebel against everything in her life right after admitting that she has been raised happily, loved and wealthy and doesn’t even know “who or what the enemy is”; quite revealingly, she tells an anecdote about a professional shrink experiencing her anger to the effect that, after a single session with her, she had to call the police in fear that Celine might actually carry out the story about killing her ex-boyfriend that she had written as a consequence of her morbid obsession with him. And maybe most importantly, the palm reader makes explicit to the audience what ends up being the central theme of Celine’s character in the trilogy: “you need to resign yourself to the awkwardness of life; only if you find peace within yourself, you’ll find true connection with others”. Sunset dares to shed quite a bit of the romantic aura that Celine was wrapped in during Sunrise where, despite all of this, she still managed to resemble a Botticelli angel, and lets her anger manifest more vividly in several moments. “The world is a mess right now!” she shouts right before a bitter political rant. She’s also deeply resentful towards Jesse who, despite her statement in Sunrise about not wanting to be “a great story” or a male fantasy, has basically decided to spectacularize their night together and sell Celine’s most intimate side to the masses. This is why Celine proceeds to lie about not remembering them having sex – she feels like Jesse has stripped her of agency and control over herself and officialized to the world a one-sided interpretation of their encounter – so she wants to reclaim ownership and hurt him at the same time (“knowing his weak points, what would hurt him, seduce him” she told him in Sunrise while talking about her habit of studying her boyfriends in order to grasp how to manipulate them). The existence of this fictionalized version of herself out in the world that she didn’t consent to, along with the death of her romantic outlook on life that prompts her notorious rant in the taxi, only makes it easier for her to allow her deep-seated anger to bubble up and start defining her. Which brings us to Midnight, where that anger is so consuming that it ends up being directed also at herself (she resents herself for failing to live up to her own expectations of both motherhood and feminism, and for letting herself be consumed by anger). She engages in a lot of borderline toxic behaviors – parental alienation (she sabotages Jesse’s ability to talk to Hank twice), false accusation and public shame (she mischaracterizes their conversation in the car at the dinner table and exposes Jesse’s private fantasy) and generic hurtful insults. Her problem with Jesse’s monopoly on how the world perceives her is as alive as ever, and she makes it a matter of relative status in the relationship. And last but not least, she also resents the world – and men – for women’s unjust impossibility to avoid having to make compromises that motherhood (or largely, the female condition) imposes on them, leading them to sacrifice leisure time or renounce to opportunities that our modern, fully technological world increasingly abounds with. In the same scene, in the hotel room, where Celine calls Jesse out for being depressed, he accuses her of seeing anger as a positive means to deal with life, and despite her refusal to concede the point in the moment, she ultimately admits to it in the last scene of the movie (“I’m an angry person and I hurt my kids, my work and everyone that I love”).
In a nutshell, we could sum up their characters as follows:
JESSE: idealized, intellectual approach to the world --> finds out about world’s imperfection --> blames himself --> existential depression.
CELINE: idealized, intellectual approach to the world --> finds out about world’s imperfection --> blames the world --> existential anger.
Particularly interesting, in this regard, is the role each of them plays in establishing the kind of path the other ends up taking. Jesse ultimately allows his depression to take over him as a consequence of Celine's decision to miss their agreed-upon second encounter six months after Sunrise, whereas Celine ultimately allows her anger to take over her as a consequence of Jesse's decision to circumvent her previously expressed wish and publish a book about the night they spent together in Vienna. In a way, they both sealed each other's existential fate in their quest for the connection they had once shared.
So, once you peel away all the layers in their characterization and identify the root core of their motivation, choices and actions, I don’t really think it’s possible to argue that they are out of character in Before Midnight. In fact, it feels like a perfect follow-up to its predecessors, designed to force the characters to confront the origin of their unhappiness and realize that they are not meant to be each other’s salvation. Just as Celine is going to have to accept Jesse’s depression as something he’s never going to be able to fully part with, Jesse is going to have to learn to deal with Celine’s unhealthy relationship with her own anger (“I’m not asking you to change, it’s called accepting you for being you”). This is where Ariadni’s words come to mind as the testament of the film – “this is what fucks us up, right? The idea of a soulmate coming to save us from taking care of ourselves”. The point of the movie is that Jesse can’t save Celine from herself, and Celine can’t save Jesse from himself – that real love, which is to say real life, is not about that.
Another quite common form of criticism that I don't get is the annoyance at the movie being willing to occasionally be critical of feminism, or explore perspectives outside of the feminist lens – particularly with Jesse's character, whose detachment from and derision of Celine's overstated feminist apologia apparently strikes to many people as a betrayal to his characterization in the previous installments. But first of all, I don’t think there's any evidence that Jesse was ever portrayed as a feminist in the previous movies – and even if he had been, how can a change in one’s own ideology or outlook on life through an eighteen-years-long experience result in an “out of character” portrayal? People change. Ideologically and politically, I’m almost a completely different person than I was three years ago. Does that make me out of character? I don't think so. But that said, many seem to move from the assumption that Sunrise and Sunset were feminist movies in the first place, which I also disagree with. In Sunrise itself, when the topic of gender comes up for the first time between the two, Jesse points out the paradoxical nature of some common female behaviors and raises a biologically-rooted counterpoint to Celine’s obviously University-derived socially constructivist outlook. Nothing about that screams “feminist” to me.
On a sidenote, though, I find incredibly illuminating Jesse’s response to Celine’s rant about female sacrifice in the hotel room scene. He sharply brings up her privileged upbringing (she actually spent her whole childhood “travelling around the world while her father built buildings” and was raised “with all the freedoms he had fought for”, as she herself said to him in Sunrise), which starkly contrasts both with his own childhood of neglect and psychological abuse and therefore with her feminist axiomatic ideas of male privilege and female oppression, and then he mentions a specific historical male-only obligation (the military draft) to swiftly rebuff her claims. She calls him an asshole, but has no real counterargument to throw back at him other than some mockery. This writing choice was actually so clever that I had to pause the movie a moment and think back about Jesse’s character. Then it occurred to me: Jesse’s been divorced and likely lost custody of his son after a strenuous legal battle with his ex-wife that both he and Celine refer to multiple times during the film. He had to spend years travelling back and forth trying to escape the dreadful destiny of turning into his own father and dealing with a progressively litigious ex-wife who apparently exploited Celine’s pregnancy and the notoriously skewed U.S. legal system to make Jesse’s attempt at remaining present in his son’s life extremely difficult – all of this while still managing to maintain some kind of sympathy from the viewers, who know she’s been wronged and cheated on by her ex-husband. The screenplay of this movie is excellent to the point of being able to condense into a single line a character’s entire lived experience and approach to things. That amazing line from Jesse about the “trenches of the Sorbonne” not only reminds the audience that he’s not a feminist; it also reveals that he’s quite versed in (and therefore accostumed to) anti-feminist talking points. Which is incredibly accurate and realistic for an American man who has found himself having to deal with custody issues – as Celine rightly points out, “I guess judges assume that women have the mother instinct”.
The fact that Jesse’s lived experience makes him critical of feminism doesn’t mean that Celine’s own lived experience is invalid, though – nor does it mean that the movie itself is anti-feminist. And there lies the brilliance of the film. Celine’s deeply-held feminist views are still entertained and tested in their validity. She is allowed to be a feminist through and through and voice her ideas, often with incredibly powerful weight and resonance – in fact, two of Celine’s best and most poignant lines in the whole movie are "The world is fucked by unemotional, rational men deciding shit" and “You know what I love about men? They still believe in magic”. Most of the film's detractors just seem upset that those ideas are not presented by the movie as golden nuggets of truth that shouldn’t be subjected to scrutiny or falsification, or treated by the screenplay as axioms that should automatically be taken for granted by everyone. I also think having Jesse laugh at Celine exposing her worries about rape to be, once again, incredibly realistic – it highlights how there will always be some level of incomprehension between the sexes, and how men will never be fully able to put themselves in women’s shoes when it comes to truly understand and empathize with that kind of fear and vulnerability. It basically testifies men’s impossibility to live the female experience.
Moreover, the same detractors that lament their disappointment at the “lack of feminism” in the movie also seem to take umbrage at Celine being portrayed as profoundly human in her complexities, which strikes me as quite the paradox. Women can be as toxic and problematic as men, albeit often in different ways. It’s Celine’s own imperfection that truly makes her a great female character. The argument underneath this criticism seems to be that a female character who engages in problematic behaviors drawing from the ugliest side of human nature does a disservice to feminism – which I guess you might think, if your feminist belief assumes that only men can really be toxic and problematic with the other sex purely out of selfish reasons. It’s quite clear to me that a socially constructivist perspective on life and the world is informing these people's judgment on the movie and the characters, whose raw realism and unfiltered humanity they seem to find ideologically inconvenient.
I have to say I’m also baffled by some people's characterization of the argument scene in the hotel room as “boring”, or an example of “classic middle-aged couple problems" film. It’s anything but, in my opinion. I find it some of the best cinema I have ever seen, with directorial choices, a screenplay and acting performances so high-ranking and engrossing that I was left mouth wide open, with so many shades and aspects that I’d never seen any other “marriage movie” seriously bring up, let alone face. I could never give justice to the excellence of that scene with words. Similarly, I’m stunned by the recurring claim that the dialogue in this movie feels forced and pretentious, given the fact that this is uncontestably the less philosophical, more grounded script of the three. Even though I also don’t agree with those who claim that Jesse and Celine were ever pretentious, I can see how Sunrise could definitely give that impression at specific moments – though the actors’ chemistry and talent were always able to hide any artificiality as much as possible. But Sunset and Midnight particularly flow with such a spontaneous and natural rhythm, as well as flawless acting expertise, that it almost seems a criminal act to press pause during the film. This specific claim seems particularly paradoxical given the fact that the same people who complain about this simultaneously express dissatisfaction with the absence of the kind of idealistic, philosophical talk that the characters had with each other when they met for the first time – which could have easily sounded pretentious if it had been delivered by lower-skilled actors. As if, by the way, the lack of that kind of magic between the two wasn’t completely intentional and exactly the point Midnight is making, particularly when it comes to what Celine laments as her own forced sacrifice of existential discussions in favor of seemingly unending, practical maternal tasks. This is a movie where Jesse says that he misses hearing Celine think, and Celine replies that her thoughts now smell like shit. Not only is the Leopardi-esque “Death of the Illusions” one of the main themes of the film, it’s also an inevitability in the relationship between two formerly idealistic intellectuals who now have to deal with their own existential dread while at the same time raising a family together and being deprived of the luxury they used to have of closing the world outside of their time-constrained connection.
About the ending scene of the movie, I admit that it had to grow on me. On my first watch I didn’t really know what to think about it, mainly because I was still recovering from the brutality of their fight in the hotel room. But the more I rewatched the movie, the more it made sense, and now I find it not only extremely fitting but also kind of brilliant. The couple’s destiny is also once again left up to interpretation and not at all cemented in a definite trajectory like I've often seen being implied. At the same time, the trilogy comes full circle by having Jesse impersonate the time-travelling role-play that won Celine over during Sunrise, and consequently by evoking in the audience a comparison between the state of Jesse and Celine’s relationship now to that of the German couple who, likewise apparently in their 40s, had prompted Celine’s decision to change seat in the train and sit opposite Jesse, reinforcing that very idea of “awkwardness of life” that the palm reader advised Celine to resign herself to in order to find true happiness. As such, the ending solidifies the idea that genuine relationships take work to function, and that true happiness has to be found in carrying that work out ("in doing, not getting what you want"). Jesse realizes this and demonstrates that he’s willing to do the work to rekindle a kind of spark and magic that can exist outside of the transformative influence of time. Celine also eventually acknowledges this, and closes the film showing her own willingness to put in her own share of the work. "It’s not perfect, but it’s real."
Overall, this movie is a masterpiece, a milestone in romance and independent cinema and, as far as I'm concerned, the bar that any film intimately interested in the exploration of the human experience and the creation of solid characterization has to outdo.
This trilogy is History, and as such I will forever treasure it and pass it on. Thank you Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy for such a gift. Ad maiora.
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