synchroni-cities - new york/elsewhere: fehrist/wishlist

Check out this most fabulous bit of terse verse!!

synchroni-cities - new york/elsewhere: fehrist/wishlist

Love at First Slight

Love at First Slight

I have to begin with a confession - I have only just seen the Before films by Robert Linklater. Having seen Julie Delpy's latest French offering (Two Nights in Paris) - I felt almost compelled to chase my new addiction. And so I dug up Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. Now that I have seen the two, I wonder if there is a third, fourth, fifth sequel. And I want to protest if the answer is no to any one of those!!!
For everyone else on this planet who already knows about the Before twin offerings - skip from here until I am done, but for those who are like me until recently living in relative ignorant bliss - here's what the plot is in a precis. American Boy meets French Girl on train in Europe on way to airplane to America. They start to talk. He proposes she gets off at Vienna with him and spend the rest of the day with him before he leaves for the airport to take his flight. She does. A lot of conversation later, the film ends and they both decide on a date and time for their next rendezvous but do not exchange numbers or addresses (okay this is a pre-email/ skype/ FB film). That's what happens Before Sunrise.
In real time - nine years later, and now the twenty somethings are thirty somethings. American Boy is now celebrated author of a novel loosely based on that one encounter with French Girl and is in Paris for book launch and promotion. She turns up at a book signing event and of course just hours before he has to take that plane back to America. Before Sunset is then the continuation of the conversation started nine years ago. And no they did not meet on the set date nine years ago - and so have much to catch up on and only measured time in which to do so. Cafes, parks, La Seine, barges on La Seine offer context and pretext for breathless conversation that brings time, audience and characters forward by nine years. It is infectious this conversation - you are drawn, withdrawn, with it, from it, to it. Linklater films Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke as if it is in real time - I catch myself tracing, tracking, looking for the cut, the edit - and believe me, it isn't easy.
But of course it is a slight - and like good slights, it works really well!!
This slight is about freezing the moment of wondrous communication and remembering that moment as perfect love and the one with whom that communication is with as the perfect lover. Better or worse still, measuring everything else against that one frozen moment - and rusing that nothing ever matches up, and ruing at the imperfection of the world!!
Watching these films when you are just about ready to hit Habermas over his head with his two-volumes on Communicative Action - because you are convinced no one really listens when it really matters - and that people only hear not what they want to hear, but when they want to hear - these films sell you that Habermasian ideal. Until now, I had never thought of JH as the potential patron saint of Men-Are-From-Mars-Women-Are-From-Venus-Dot-Com. But hey, look how wonderful and truly gratifying it is if in your twenties you meet just the person who can hear your eyes move nano-inch by nano-inch in those 2.2 sound boxes in music shops, and when you are thirty something can listen in your gloating reminiscencing of your two-year old wondrous, wonderful child - that all is really not well. Especially when you don't have all the time in the world to get on with things. And the whole point is to achieve maximum communicative rationality (or rather irrationality - considering this is all about lurve), in the shortest possible time to achieve the maximum potential for an ideal and idealised togetherness! And really never have to test it in real time!!
Lurvely!!
Truly.
Madly.
Deeply!

Okay - for those of you who haven't seen this - go and see it, and tell me if these Before films are the biggest con in this world - a whole capitalist conspiracy to keep you and me stupefied in the potential, in that never-will-it-be-possible-but-go-on-the fantasy-alone-is-worth-it..
In the meanwhile I am taking a train to rural Hungary to take a train to Vienna, Paris and who knows write a novel en route!