GAME 3: BEFORE SUNRISE vs. ROMANCE

What Americans think happens in Europe versus what really happens in Europe

Richard Linklater may have kickstarted 1990s indie cinema with Slacker, but the heart of that movie really belongs to the last days of the subcultural 1980s. Before Sunrise, his first hit and one that sits in the dead middle of the decade, seemed a better fit for us and the playoffs. In Before Sunrise Ethan Hawke is an American on a train in Europe. He flirts with Julie Delpy on her way back to Paris and invites her to spend the night with him wandering Vienna before his flight home. They fall in love over long conversation and stolen time.

It’s what Americans think happens in Europe, whereas the films of French director Catherine Breillat are closer to what really happens in Europe. As a filmmaker she’s a bridge between the end of the New Wave in the 1970s and the New French Extremity of the 2000s. A novelist turned director, her films unflinchingly investigate power and sex through a memoirist style that’s been called an “intimate revolt.” Starting with 1999’s Romance she did so with scenes of unsimulated sex, causing decades of controversy, and giving rise to a mini-movement in film.

So which version of pre-millennial Europe will win? Vote below now, or read our discussion and come back here!

BRIAN J DAVIS: This is the movie where Ethan Hawke won’t have sex with his girlfriend anymore and she blows him up?

EMILY SCHULTZ: No, that’s the other movie.

BJD: Well, here’s the great thing about this. Of all these movies, I have never seen Before Sunset until now!

ES: And I saw it in the theater on a date.

BJD: For you, Ethan Hawke was your main 1990s crush?

ES: I admit that I do really like Ethan Hawke.

BJD: And also with a clean record, too! A lot of your ’90s icons are gone.

ES: And we can no longer talk about them.

BJD: Ethan Hawke is like the perfect MFA boyfriend here — look at that merlot mock turtleneck sweater, scraggly little goatee, hair slicked back because he hasn’t had a cut in six months.

ES: I’m looking at Julie Delpy now actually. Looking good in that baby T and sundress!

BJD: Now we’ve entered a new bracket in our competition: Love in the Ruins. And it’s hard to explain to someone who wasn’t a teenager in the 1990s that the overall messaging we received was: If you have sex, you will die. And that may have affected us a bit.

ES: No one younger than us understands that.

BJD: On theme! She’s French and reading Georges Bataille, who once said that the only two rational responses to sex are laughter or tears. It’s interesting Ethan Hawke is pitching the sequel right here: he’s asking her to think in the future 10 years, and maybe her marriage isn’t the best, will she have regrets about this moment?

ES: It’s actually really difficult to talk over a movie that is nothing but talking.

[Here we decided to mute the movie and watch with subtitles.]

BJD: Dreams, Situationist theory, time and relativity. Linklater has made this movie at least three times but this is probably the version that broke into the mainstream the most.

ES: Okay, the listening booth scene is so cute. It’s so clear they want to kiss and are trying not to. Okay. I have to admit I really thought that I was going to hate this movie on rewatch because I thought it was going to be so saccharine. Instead—

BJD: Someone has moved an X-ray screen in front of your heart and it’s Grinch’d out three sizes too large? Their kiss on the Ferris wheel is so good. They both have that beautiful dumb look after a first kiss.

ES: That was a good first kiss. But the question is, is it going to get saccharine?

BJD: I think going back to my idea that love in the 1990s was shaded with death. Even in this movie, they are on a clock here. They have 12 hours to be in love.

ES: They are talking a lot about death.

BJD: As you do when you’re that young, and then if you’re lucky you forget about it for 20 years, and then it really starts happening.

ES: The other thing that they’re doing that was common when I was that age, which was defining yourself in opposition to your parents. But now I actually don’t think it's that common.

BJD: Well, I can’t speak for an entire generation. But maybe I should! We’re quite the oppositional generation.

ES: Oh no. He’s now acting like a bit of dick to her. I remember not liking that.

BJD: They do want to contrast them, right? He’s American and a little gormless. She’s French and perfect. But also, I don’t think I could stop myself from being a dick in my twenties no matter what country I was in.

ES: Give me an example.

BJD: Anytime I opened my mouth? Sometimes I would realize I just spoke to someone for four hours but did I believe a single word of what I said? You don’t even really care about it until you wake up one morning and say I wish I could stop being a dick. Now, I do want to ask, do you think Ethan Hawke’s character would like this movie?

ES: I think he’d probably make fun of it in some way. And when we were going to put it on, I was like, we’re going to make fun of this in some way. But—

BJD: You’ve been grinning ear to ear in joy! This is what I will say about youth and dating. When first dates lasted 12 hours, you would start at like 2 p.m. coffee and it would go till 2 a.m. Those dates did bend time. So this setup is natural for Linklater’s main preoccupation with time.

ES: I think that bending time is overrated because eventually you have to live in the real world.

BJD: I’m going to disagree with you, there’s no difference between what you’re calling the real world and those moments where you feel outside of it — I hope that part is always accessible. But then again, even Philip K. Dick wrote, Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

ES: Dick move! Also, so much of their conversation in this film is coming off as trite now.

BJD: That’s true. I’m also going to say that the trite conversations we have when we’re 19 to even our mid-twenties, we are learning how to think. Especially as writers. You have to learn empathy. You have to learn how to see multiple viewpoints. And the path to that place — ironically — is total navel-gazing obsession with yourself and your condition.

ES: So you’re saying this is something we have to go through?

BJD: Yes, and if you’re lucky, you don’t do that in public… like we did! I can’t believe newspapers and magazines paid 25-year-old us for our thoughts.

ES: Okay, this is cute. The fake phone call to their friends, telling them about the date.

BJD: Oh, look, he doesn’t have a real camera. He has to take her picture with his mind.

ES: No phones anywhere, just people living their life. Taking mind photos!

BJD: So about their conversation, it seems like they have a terror of knowing someone too much. There really is a terror of routine. And maybe this is a Gen X thing, right? We were the divorce generation.

ES: I don't think I felt the terror of knowing somebody, though. I think I desperately wanted to know people. Probably too many people!

BJD: Just so you know, I'm crying at this goodbye scene!

ES: “Au revoir… later.” We need to do that as a T-shirt!

BJD: Okay, what if after seeing her off at the train, Ethan Hawke immediately then tried to pick up another woman with the exact same story?

ES: That would have been a great ending. And we’re ending almost on the same shot that we started with.

BJD: No, it’s their entire date, but in static daytime shots. Which is pretty brilliant of you, Linklater.

ES: Showing that they were the magic of the night.

BJD: That old lady walking through the park knows someone fucked at that spot with the empty wine bottle. Look at her face. She can tell!

ES: I don’t think we can top that.

BJD: I do have to point out that this DVD of Romance was purchased at a church rummage sale in Montauk where we were on vacation. And it’s the uncut version!

ES: You also got a Mac monitor for 10 bucks!

BJD: Now to talk a bit about how you and I ended up seeing almost every Catherine Breillat film. I make a lot of Toronto jokes here, with much affection, but I will give it this. It’s the kind of place where — while we lived there — every single Catherine Breillat movie opened for some reason. The sick and horny soul of Toronto was in love with Breillat.

ES: I actually saw her do a Q&A at TIFF for Sex Is Comedy and it was sold out. I just remember seeing this film and thinking I’d never seen a movie like this before.

BJD: Why do you think Romance has such an impact on you?

ES: Because it has a female character who wants sex. It really is that basic. Even though she is in an annoying couple.

BJD: Their world is aggressively beige.

ES: This is 1999.

BJD: And if you look at this woman’s world as she starts to get into the S&M relationships and pickups, it gets very red and black. Now, here’s the thing about Breillat. She is a singular artist with literally a single subject. Do you think she ran out of things to say over the years?

ES: That’s a possibility. I think the other thing about her films is that once you know she’s shocking, then it becomes less shocking.

BJD: I think my peak Breillat experience was Anatomy of Hell. Probably the combination of the character’s identities spoke to me the most. I still can’t believe I watched that movie in public.

ES: I feel like Romance is mine. And Fat Girl.

BJD: Oh, God, the driving scene in Fat Girl and then the shock ending. It’s so stress inducing.

ES: The French title translated—To My Sister—is so much less cringe. But I don’t think I could ever recommend that movie to anyone!

BJD: Welcome to Cinema Dirtbag! Where we risk subscribers over film recommendations!

ES: She and her boyfriend are so boring they could be in the background of Before Sunrise on a completely numb vacation in Vienna.

BJD: While Ethan Hawke would be making fun of them! We'll get to it, but my favorite part of Romance is the ending.

ES: The ending’s great.

BJD: It’s what I like most about Breillat. Her filmmaking. The mix of the neorealist, long takes, and then some total Eurotrash flashes right out of Jean Rollin or Jess Franco.

ES: This movie did really inspire me because I was just starting to publish when I saw it. I remember early in my career being told by a literary scenester that I should be careful about writing one kind of story because after a while that was all people would expect from me. And what he meant by that was a sexual story.

BJD: God, I hate people like that. The random asshole who wants to impart his wisdom, essentially stopping people from being themselves.

ES: What a sad penis. I mean, on screen right now. I will say that when I saw this movie, I couldn’t understand why she was so focused on her shitty boyfriend. That her worth is involved in whether he sexually responds to her or not.

BJD: That’s the moment she makes her decision to go on her erotic journey of self-discovery, right? How many times can I say erotic journey of self-discovery?

ES: She’s picking someone up now. This is Before Sunrise, but if she had nine Ethan Hawkes in one season.

BJD: Maybe we need to talk a little bit about the unsimulated sex era, which were mostly French films in the aughts — but Romance in 1999 was the start of using doubles, and adult performers in narrative filmmaking.

ES: We should also talk about the fact that there have been some things said about Breillat in the media, in terms of what she allowed on set.

BJD: I understand the French urge to take down the boundaries. This was 1999. Pornography went from limited access, to everywhere all at once. But I think there are good reasons to keep them separate. Both filmmaking and porn are workplaces. But with very different expectations. Casually mixing up the boundaries of the two potentially opens things up to performers getting hurt. In this case it did — though the lead actress has more complicated feelings than we can relay here. But, you have to ask yourself, What are you getting out of it artistically? Like, in Romance there are unsimulated shots next to merkins.

ES: Yeah, that’s weird. I think the acted bondage scenes are so much more emotionally intense, and they’re completely clothed — that’s the power of pretending.

BJD: I do think the unsimulated approach works to much greater effect in a couple of other movies, because the intensity of sex is integral to the characters’ actions — Virginie Despentes’ Baise Moi, and Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake.

ES: Let me emphasize, to GREAT effect in Stranger by the Lake. Oh wow. I hate her model boyfriend so much. “A man has to remake the world with his pals in a bar.”

BJD: The thing is, any guy who says that has no friends. And now we find out she’s a schoolteacher!

ES: I forgot about her principal.

BJD: Her principal with a dark secret.

ES: Well, Brian, have you known many schoolteachers? They all have dark secrets!

BJD: He’s actually quite tender with her during their bondage scenes.

ES: I’ll say this about Before Sunrise and this — if you look at the two female characters, they’re an interesting contrast. In Before Sunrise, Julie Delpy’s character Céline can mock Ethan Hawke’s character, and call him out, but she can also speak very honestly about her uncertainty. In Romance the lead doesn’t seem to know what her value is, but she knows what she wants.

BJD: She wants to get pregnant and she somehow does after five second sex with her boyfriend.

ES: And now a doctor exam. Since we grew up in a country with socialized health care, I’m thinking this is something Americans don’t know about. Where something so uncomfortable is about to happen and suddenly there are five or six student doctors in the room with you. With gloves!

BJD: It’s so Breillat that she turns that into a fantasy scene with the sleaziest looking medical students ever. Like that guy in the back is totally a grip they put a white coat on.

ES: Okay, last minutes of life for the boyfriend. It’s like this guy is the repository of every dumb thing that a man has ever said out loud.

BJD: This is the most miserable relationship on film since Diary of a Mad Housewife. And unlike that movie, this ends with the death of the terrible partner. And that’s the satisfaction I think you were looking for at the end of Mad Housewife.

ES: Oh look, she saved the cat before turning on the gas, and going to the hospital to give birth.

BJD: And then the jump cut to the funeral procession and the best needle drop in French film history: Funkadelic’s “Free Your Mind … and Your Ass Will Follow.” How are you going to vote, Emily?

ES: It’s like, okay, do we let the weird goth kid be valedictorian? You usually want to say yes but this is a complicated film.

BJD: Um, did you know I was voted valedictorian but the admin nullified the vote on the basis I would say something weird? There are flaws in this movie, and there are flaws in how it was made, but maybe I should vote for it, just to prove that school administration right!

ES: And in an odd twist, I’m switching back to Before Sunrise. Breillat is similar to a director like Lars von Trier, in that if you’ve seen one film you know what the tricks will be. I’m going to with Linklater for an actual romance.