Jesse and Céline forever: "Before Sunrise" at 30

Reissued this weekend to mark its thirtieth anniversary, Before Sunrise was several things happening at once. It was part of a post-Maastricht wave, unimaginable today, of films funded by the Castle Rock production shingle about the romantic misadventures of Americans in Europe, where it was preceded by Whit Stillman's marvellous Barcelona and followed by Billy Crystal's now mostly forgotten Forget Paris. It was the then-blossoming American independent cinema branching out, under the guidance of the ever-curious and open-minded Austin resident Richard Linklater. Most crucially of all, it was twelve or so life-changing hours in the lives of two characters initially encountered as strangers on a train, heading west from who knows where. In retrospect, it seems spooky that the pair's first conversation - sparked by a squabbling married couple in the same carriage - should be about the perils and pitfalls of growing old together. (Call it subconscious foreshadowing.) But they talk, and after they hit it off and disembark together for a layover in a sunkissed Vienna, they walk and talk, as young adults in major European cities and American independent movies have always done. If there was a twist on late 20th century romantic formula, it was that the guy, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), was characterised as the dreamier of the two, a surrogate for Linklater himself (co-writing with Kim Krizan), who'd undergone an experience much like this at a formative moment. It was his travelling companion, young Frenchwoman Céline (Julie Delpy), who would be characterised as the more pragmatic figure - though as she looked as Julie Delpy did in the summer of 1994, which is to say not unlike an angel in human form, she was also the kind of girl a guy might well get dreamy about. (Or so a friend told me.)

It wasn't new to make dialogue the whole shebang: the garrulous Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith had done similar, recently. What felt fresh was the sincere interest in the world(s) that lay beyond pop culture, and in places beyond American cities and towns. This was a film to counter the widely circulated statistic about the shockingly low percentage of Americans who owned passports; it could also be used to push back against anyone claiming Linklater didn't have much of an idea where to put his camera, that he was basically a man filming radio plays. True, it helps that Jesse and Céline pull into Vienna on a gorgeous summer's evening - which makes, say, sleeping overnight in a park less of a dampener than it might have been - but Linklater and Krizan's dialogue also serves to open up both the frame and the frame of reference: Céline cites the ongoing war in what were then the remains of the former Yugoslavia, while a passing encounter with a palm reader ("you need to make peace with the awkwardness of life") carries the leads and viewer alike towards the metaphysical realm. Linklater returned from his European vacation with a document of a particular place at a particular time: the streets, the quays, the trams, the bars. But he'd also arrived at a study of the people occupying this particular place at this particular time, and it was here that Before Sunrise began to work its specific charm.

Jesse and Céline felt like a new kind of screen character, possibly inspired by folks Linklater had ran into around Austin: bookish, but unsure what exactly to do with all their knowledge; socially engaged, but sceptical as to what good that did them; full of youthful vim and vigour, but only too aware of the short time any of us have on this earth. The casting was mid-Nineties hot but meant to last, not least because Hawke and Delpy had such obvious, abundant chemistry they could respond to one another mid-scene with gestures of their own invention. Individually, they could surprise and redirect each other, while ensuring their scene partner looked their very best at every turn of map and script; together, they could make this brief encounter seem real, special, magical, as evanescent as life itself. (Never more so than in their last scene.) The older the rest of us get, the more two things stick out. One: we now spend at least five minutes worrying that one or both parties have left luggage behind in some train or bar, never to be retrieved again. But Linklater intends these characters to be travelling literally and spiritually light, to be carrying the little-to-no baggage that is a privilege for many Western twentysomethings. Two (and not unrelated): we can see what an idealised vision of young love Before Sunrise is. Sometimes, the movie is actively dorky: intercutting that doesn't wholly match, non-starter conversational tangents ("This is a nice bridge"), Hawke's psychiatrist character. Linklater was young and finding his feet, too - though his closing montage was so masterly it would be taught in film schools for decades to come. More complicated and dramatically accomplished trysts would follow: Before Sunset in 2004, Before Midnight in 2013, their running flirtations and arguments already lurking in inchoate form here. These were Jesse and Céline's baby steps, this their debutante ball. It's still adorable.

Before Sunrise returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow.

Construction in progress: "The Brutalist"

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"Sky Force" (Guardian 25/01/25)

Sky Force **

Dirs: Abhishek Anil Kapur, Sandeep Kewlani. With: Akshay Kumar, Nimrat Kaur, Sari Ali Khan, Veer Pahariya. 125 mins. Cert: 15

The hope would be that the Hindi mainstream is learning from its current spell of commercial turbulence. The visual evidence, alas, suggests otherwise. For Republic Day 2024, we were offered Fighter, a glossy all-star flypast that found the industry aping Top Gun: Maverick with more explicit flagwaving; despite a considerable promotional push, it divebombed at the box office. This year, we get Sky Force, a period variation on much the same theme, unpicking the fallout from an Indian strike on a Pakistani airbase during the aerial conflict of 1965. While avoiding complete crash-and-burn, directors Abhishek Anil Kapur and Sandeep Kewlani are but tinkering within an increasingly resistible framework.

For starters, this sortie is sober rather than flashy about its saluting. Scenes are timestamped to underline the factual basis; the xenophobia gets dialled down as far as this genre allows. Yet the arms budget has also been slashed in Fighter’s wake. It’s not so noticeable on the ground, where Akshay Kumar’s upright Group Captain Ahuja briefs his squadron of young Tigers: flyboys with try-hard call names like Cockroach, Panther and Bull. (Imperfectly chiselled, almost-hunky, likable newcomer Veer Pahariya draws the short straw as Tabby, Sky Force’s own Private Ryan.) You can’t, however, miss the cheapness up in the air, where every other dogfight has the look of cut scenes from a mid-Nineties PlayStation game.

The obvious lesson is how these filmed military parades perk up whenever their characters travel off-base. Though curtailed by sirens, the one musical number has colour beyond khaki; there's even stuff to like in the perfunctory domestic scenes. Yet the boys keep being recalled to barracks for scenes organised less around spectacle than a po-faced idea of duty. As in 2016's Rustom and 2021's Bellbottom, period garb fits Kumar well, and the star displays some leadership in steering matters towards a humanist centreground. But the character still wants a medal pinned to his chest, and the movie still ends by insisting "dying for your country is an honourable sacrifice, not suicide". C’mon producers: give peace a chance.

Sky Force is now showing in selected cinemas.

In memoriam: Bertrand Blier (Telegraph 24/01/25)

Bertrand Blier, who has died aged 85, was a French filmmaker whose comedies – notably Les valseuses (Going Places, 1974) and Trop belle pour toi! (1989) – ranged from the provocative to the deeply politically incorrect. Almost as shocking now is that his oeuvre briefly synched with American tastes, landing him a Foreign Film Oscar for Préparez vos mouchoirs (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, 1978).

Bearded and pipe-smoking, the broadly incorrigible Blier began making mischievous hay at a moment where the once-radical New Wave filmmakers were being viewed as loftily academic or simply old hat. The very title of Les valseuses, by contrast, formed an offence-intending mission statement, being as it was slang for the testes.

This galumphing road movie, which its maker framed as “a French Clockwork Orange”, centred on a pair of hitchhikers (Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere) traversing the countryside in search of girls and cheap thrills. Both were found; but even in 1974, viewers had to weigh the earthy humour against the brutish treatment of women (among them Jeanne Moreau and the young Isabelle Huppert), varyingly harassed, groped and set upon, often discarded at the roadside.

Among those objecting was the filmmaker Chantal Akerman, who personally picketed screenings, telling queuing punters the film was “an insult to women”. But it had admirers, too, including Pauline Kael, who compared the film to Ben Jonson’s farces and found the leads’ crude energy “joyous”: “Life to them is like a big meal: they go at it like hungry workmen tearing at a carcass of beef, with greasy fingers.”

Six million people saw it in France alone, enough for Blier to be offered the film rights to stage hit La Cage aux Folles. Turning them down (as he later rued: “I would have made billions”), he instead refined his approach to some degree. Despite having its unhappy housewife heroine (Carole Laure) impregnated by a 13-year-old boy, Préparez vos mouchoirs was comparatively respectable: Mozart on the soundtrack, Depardieu and Dewaere recast as clueless cuckolds.

Even so it provoked division: TV’s Siskel and Ebert vehemently disagreed, with the latter insisting the film “should be cut up to make ukulele picks”. Audiences and awards voters had to decide for themselves; the Oscar win, as Blier admitted, was unlikely – People magazine called it “downright incomprehensible” – but helped by Ingmar Bergman’s decision to pull Autumn Sonata (1978) from the Foreign Language Film category, following his battles with the Swedish tax authorities.

For a while, Blier risked respectability. Buffet Froid (1979) sent up the thriller genre – dispatching Depardieu after a missing penknife – and won the Best Screenplay César. The hits kept coming: La femme de mon pote (My Best Friend’s Girl, 1983), a vehicle for national treasure Coluche; and Tenue de soirée (Evening Dress, 1986), a bizarre love triangle putting Depardieu and Michel Blanc in drag.

Trop belle pour toi!, wherein Depardieu ditched trophy wife Carole Bouquet to shack up with mousy secretary Josiane Balasko, outdid them all, sharing the Cannes Grand Prix with Cinema Paradiso (1988) and winning five Cesars, including Best Film and Best Director. Again, many were surprised. Yet Blier maintained even this crowning achievement derived from a familiar French urge: “I’ve always enjoyed shocking the bourgeois.”

Bertrand Blier was born in Boulogne-Billancourt [now Hauts-de-Seine] on March 14, 1939, to the actor Bernard Blier and his wife Gisèle (née Brunet). He soon found himself surrounded by luminaries, recalling one trip where “every night my father and [Henri-Georges] Clouzot would smoke their pipes while playing chess”. His mother, however, prompted trickier memories: in Fragile des bronches, an autobiographical novel of 2022, Blier recalled seeing Gisèle on a windowsill, apparently considering suicide.

Blier once claimed he slashed his own wrists so to avoid serving in Algeria; instead, he found work as an assistant director to Jean Delannoy and Christian-Jaque. He debuted with Hitler, connais pas (1963), a documentary profiling post-war youth, before casting his father in the thriller If I Were a Spy (1967).

Blier followed Trop belle pour toi! with Merci la vie (1991) and Mon homme (1996), showcases for his then-partner Anouk Grinberg. Yet the new millennium saw a creative tail-off: all-star flop Les acteurs (1999) was followed by critical derision for the haranguing farce Les côtelettes (2003). Le bruit des glaçons (The Clink of Ice, 2010) drolly rebutted cancer-movie pieties, but there were few takers for Convoi exceptionnel (Heavy Duty, 2019), a final reunion with Depardieu. 

Blier was among those signing a 2023 letter supporting the actor in the wake of rape and sexual harassment allegations; the accusations resulted in the cancellation of a planned 50th anniversary TV screening of the pair’s breakthrough film in early 2024. Sixteen years earlier, however, Blier recalled his first grab at infamy with obvious glee. “With Les valseuses,” he said, “I got my hands on France’s package.”

He is survived by his third wife, the actress Farida Rahouadj, and three children: one by Rahouadj, one from his relationship with Grinberg, and one by his second wife, the producer Catherine Blier Florin. His first wife was Francoise Vergnaud.

Bertrand Blier, born March 14, 1939, died January 20, 2025.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of January 17-19, 2025):

1 (new) A Complete Unknown (15) **

2 (1) Mufasa: The Lion King (PG)

3 (3) Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

4 (2) Nosferatu (15) ***

5 (4) We Live in Time (15) **

6 (5) Babygirl (18) ***

7 (new) Wolf Man (15)

8 (8) Moana 2 (U) ***

9 (7) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

10 (6) A Real Pain (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Se7en

2. Babygirl

3. A Real Pain

4. Nickel Boys

5. Nosferatu

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Gladiator II (15) ***

2 (1) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

3 (2) Conclave (12) ****

4 (3) The Wild Robot (U) **

5 (23) Despicable Me 4 (U)

6 (5) Alien: Romulus (15) ***

7 (11) Terrifier 3 (18)

8 (36) The Substance (18) **

9 (6) Venom: The Last Dance (15)

10 (20) The Wizard of Oz (U) [above] *****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Juror #2

2. Speak No Evil

3. Kneecap

4. Evil Does Not Exist

5. The Apprentice

On demand: "The Blue Caftan"

From its opening exploration of a rippling expanse of royal blue silk being readied for tailoring by a masterly pair of hands, the enveloping Moroccan drama The Blue Caftan suggests a version of Phantom Thread with fewer eccentricities and altogether greater heart and warmth. Co-writer/director Maryam Touzani films two simultaneous crises in a small, husband-and-wife-run tailor's shop in downtown Salé. The first is professional: too much work has led ailing, devout Mina (Lubna Azabal) and her other half Halim (Saleh Bakri) to hire a handsome young apprentice, Youssef (Ayoub Missioui), to help out around the place. This Youssef does, but he also brings about a personal crisis. Mina, who may or may not have been aware of Halim's bisexual leanings when she entered into matrimony, can only observe the growing closeness between her man and this new recruit: the steering hand placed on the apprentice's scissors, the breath on the back of the neck. As these three begin to pull and push one another - and the commemorative commission of the title takes shape - we observe closely linked relationships stretching and straining like cloth, with the constant threat of tearing. The film's theme is alteration in all its forms, how - despite all the tradition in the world (and in the tailoring world specifically) - things do still sometimes change: waistlines, loyalties, materials, prognoses, attachments, desires.

What that gives rise to is a minor miracle of nuanced, layered screenwriting. Every other line here folds back onto itself, thickens with meaning and suggestion. Even when talking about buttons and grommets, these coworkers seem to be talking about themselves, and what catches their eye; much goes unspoken, but somehow a lot is conveyed. Somewhere in the background, Touzani seeds an idea about the accelerated pace of modern life - so much work, so little time - and how it limits our means of recovery. (It feels an especially resonant film to encounter as we disentangle ourselves from Covid and enter the brave new world of our tech-bro profiteers.) By contrast, The Blue Caftan stands resolute as a slow burn, an exemplar of judicious, measured craft. The small space of the shop forces the actors together, as it does customers and staff; the result is an astonishingly tactile film, full of expressive framing and gestures. You'll remember the close-ups of hands, picking fruit, smoothing down, reaching out. You'll remember the Vermeer-like still lives this camera captures in passing, the quality of light in the workshop and the couple's home. Most of all, you'll remember these actors: the yearning, smouldering Azabal, whose Mina only ever seems one smile away from a happier life; the upright, noble, Firth-ish Bakri, whose Halim knows the trouble he's causing Mina and loves her anyway; the no less sensitive Missioui, unaware of the behind-the-shutters turmoil he's caused, determined not to be anybody's plaything. It's rare to encounter a drama whose characters are so determined to do the right thing by others, even if it means denying and hurting themselves. Touzani doesn't want these innately good people to fall out of one another's good graces. We don't, either. But sometimes time passes; sometimes things change.

The Blue Caftan is available on DVD through New Wave Films, and to rent via Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, the BFI Player and YouTube.

On demand: "A Woman of Paris"

Chaplin's short comedies had made him such a big star by 1923 that he had to insert a title card into the opening credits of A Woman of Paris, his feature-length directorial debut, pointing out that this romantic melodrama would be the first of his works in which he would not personally be appearing. In some respects, he was lying: Chaplin has a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo as a railway porter, removed of his familiar Tramp get-up. Still, his fanbase weren't to know this, and you do wonder if any patrons of the time, drawn to the nickelodeon by the prospect of seeing a small man kicking a bigger man up the arse and then running away, let slip a disappointed "aw" before hastening to the exit; or whether the guarantee of seeing something Chaplinesque, albeit sans Chaplin himself, was still enough to keep them seated. (It's not as though the auditorium would have been over-subscribed; the film's commercial failure led Chaplin to suppress all prints until the late 1970s, by which time his legacy had been secured.) In the Chaplin filmography, this is something like his Interiors, the point at which a funnyman artist removes himself from the frame so as to assert the seriousness of his art - to impress upon us that he is no mere comedian - and to turn that frame over to unhappy women in his absence. Here the unhappy woman is Edna Purviance's provincial gal Marie, introduced being turfed out of her childhood home and separated from artist beau Jean (Carl Miller) en route to the big city, as if she were lost luggage. Once resettled, Marie takes up with cad-slash-bounder Adolphe Menjou, only to be reunited with Jean at a later date, precipitating a crisis of heart.

In its vision of guileless young lovers separated - and then reunited - by circumstance, A Woman of Paris sets the stage for Murnau's Sunrise four years later; it is not, as Chaplin must have realised, a simple matter of a small man kicking a bigger man up the arse before running away. Instead, we get a different form of movie art: the delicacies of framing, lighting and mood that would occasionally be apparent in its maker's later, better known vehicles, enhanced here by the extra time and perspective that follow from stepping back from the action and turning one's attention to the contributions of others. The movie remains largely setbound - where Murnau afforded himself greater scope to run wild and experiment with technique - but these particular sets facilitate as much finesse as they do control. They're impeccably dressed, for starters, bringing us close to the high life of 1923 - a milieu Chaplin would presumably have been familiar with - without obscuring the story's emotional stakes or our clear line of sight on our heroine's predicament. Who would you choose? The man who refers to you as his "little woman" and provides security, even luxury, but only the remotest access to his heart? Or the obvious equal, who can offer boundless love, but not a penny more? One further, site-specific complication for contemporary viewers to wrestle with: the fact Menjou, on his way to a long and celebrated career, is several times more charismatic than the naggingly flat and pallid Miller, left clutching to "penurious virtue" by way of characterisation. Yet even a century later, there must still be women, in many more cities than Paris, mulling over some version of the same quandary; the movie will endure so long as the wealth remains unredistributed.

The 2022 remaster of A Woman of Paris is now streaming via NOW TV.