The Kingdom of Shadows

People really talk too much in Before Sunrise, and it ruins the entire film. Which is too bad, because I really want to like this film (mainly because I have a crush on Julie Delpy left over from White), but everyone in the film is constantly chattering about complete crap.

The romance is rather poorly contrived as well, the filmmaker - Richard Linklater - seems to have decided that he needed to differentiate the characters enough to establish the fact that they have different personalities, and of course that French and American people are different, but one can't help but wondering what they like about each other (this gets more accentuated in the sequal, where there's a lot of talking about how passionate they are about one another).

There are a few nice things in the film though, primarily a short conversation towards the beginning about a TV show one of the characters though up, that is an adaptation of André Bazin's concept of total cinema. To sum up Bazin's concept, he argued that humans have a desire to create as deep a relationship between cinema and their lived experience of the world, as humanly possible (the arguement is in itself a bit tricky, because he is not arguing that cinema should be "realistic" he is arguing that it should have a relationship to reality, which are two entirely different things). The main character in Before Sunrise, talks about a TV show where you just follow an individual for 24 hours, every day a different individual, and show everything. The thought being that if you didn't edit it, then you could not help but really see the person in all his or her strengths and weaknesses (There is actually more of Vertov in that idea than Bazin, but there is little doubt that the director is thinking about Bazin, given that Bazin comes up in Waking Life, another Linklater film).

I find the idea of the TV show vaguely pleasant, in the same way I find the idea of Vertov pleasant (and amateur pornography). I get the impression Linklater thought that this TV show was something like what he was trying to do, unfortunately the phoniness of the dialog seeps through at every moment of the film.

The only reason I would suggest seeing this film is because I think Before Sunset is worth watching, I'm also hoping that I could ask Julie Delpy for a date one day, and I don't want to be on the record saying any of her movies are crap.

Update: I discovered this post the day after I wrote my post. Though obviously we disagree on most things, it seems Julie Delpy can really do something to a film.

Buy Before Sunrise here