TubeTalk: Sweet-cakes & Milkshakes Before Sunrise

It’s been a while since I had a TV in my room, but now that the tube’s back making it’s presence felt again in the land of daydreams and nightmares, I’ve had the chance to tune in regularly to Arts Central, which, by my reckoning, is hands-down the best free-to-air channel in Singapore.

So last week I was watching Before Sunrise on FilmArt Central (one heckuva romantic movie, if you asked me) when out of the blue, my brother suddenly asked, “Why is this Film Art?”

I was a bit stumped there and then, cos he rarely asks me this kind of a question.

“Har?” I replied, buying myself some time by pretending not to have heard his question while my brain whirred into overdrive in search of an answer.

“Why is this Film Art?” he asked again.

Well now, I could hazard a close guess why that question might’ve popped into his mind:

1. He’d probably recall seeing Ethan Hawke in stuff like Training Day and Assault on Precinct 13.
2. Before Sunrise is a film in colour.
3. Before Sunrise is a film in English.

Therefore, the equation: 1+2+3 = Why is this Film Art?

Armed with this unscientific equation, I came up with this answer. “Oh, this movie is about two people talking. For 1 1/2 hours.”

“That’s it?” he said, somewhat unconvinced.

“Yah, that’s it.”

*****

Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise is very much a “talkie”, in the sense that the main characters talk a lot and nothing much else happens. Very French-like, so perhaps it’s fitting that Julie Delpy plays the lead, Celine, opposite Hawke’s Jesse.

Talk a lot they do, but the seamless exchange of words are so natural, flow with so little effort, that they are spoken music of an enchanting tune that is at times tentative, at times contemplative, but always rich with the sweetness of falling in love. Amidst the streets of Vienna, words as music swirls the would-be lovers into a private world, a musical box where he, a boy, and she, a girl, dance the romantic steps of courtship through the tenderness of night.

For Celine and Jesse, before sunrise, everything is magic; everything is real. But daybreak brings the harshness of light that overshadows the rapturous glow of burgeoning love. With dawn comes the first vestige of uncertainties. At the film’s close, Celine and Jess walk their separate ways, after a promise in haste to meet again. A question hangs unasked on all our lips — ours, Celine’s, Jesse’s: Will they?

We dare not ask because asking is doubt, and doubt is the breaker of spells, and of magic. And over 1 1/2 hours of talking, we have grown to care too much for Celine and Jesse. We do not want their spell of love to break. But like a sudden daybreak, the light comes on in the cinema and just like that, a spell is broken. Reality takes over; all that remains is uncertainty.

Before Sunrise is a moment of magic. Perhaps that is why it’s on FilmArt.

Sweet-cakes & Milkshakes

There is a scene in the film when Celine and Jesse meet a street poet along the river. The poet makes them an offer: they give him a word, he makes a poem out of it, they pay him if they like the poem. Celine throws out the highly original “milkshake”. This is what the poet came up with:

Daydream, delusion, limousine, eyelash
Oh baby with your pretty face
Drop a tear in my wineglass
Look at those big eyes
See what you mean to me
Sweet-cakes and milkshakes

I’m a delusion angel
I’m a fantasy parade
I want you to know what I think
Don’t want you to guess anymore
You have no idea where I came from
We have no idea where we’re going
Lodged in life
Like branches in a river
Flowing downstream
Caught in the current
I’ll carry you
You’ll carry me
That’s how it could be
Don’t you know me?
Don’t you know me by now?

Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Before_Sunrise, last accessed 25 May 2008.

Celine likes it, but Jesse thinks the poet probably wrote it beforehand and just plugged their word somewhere. I happen to think it reflects an option the two, in the back of their minds, might have taken. Even more so, if you’ve seen Before Sunset.

What do you think? Feel free to comment away!

Asides:

1. Before Sunset airs tonight, Sunday, 25 May 2008, at 10.00pm on FilmArt Central. The story takes place 9 (real-life) years later. Many things have changed, some things haven’t. Will the two finally get together?
   space for reading
2. In the 9 years in-between the films, Celine and Jesse made a small animated cameo in Linklater’s Waking Life.

*****

About an hour into the film, my brother remarked, “Is it still the same night (in the film)?”

“Yah.”

” . . . “

I think he found his own answer to his question then.