Somewhere in-between sunrise and sunset

'Memory is a wonderful thing, if you don’t have to deal with the past…'

My mate took a girl to his place for a date once, whilst we were at uni, to watch Before Sunrise. I had never seen it up until to this point. My mate told me 'oh you'll love it, it's just two people walking around a city and talking.' Sounded great to me!

I don't recall the frist time I saw the film...I think it was on videotape, perhaps the same one my mate used for his date...uni is a strange time, framented in places. A few years later, I heard about a sequel, Before Sunset, much to my sickness. A film which is originally about two people finding something in each other, the bravery of trust, the magic one night can bring and what really is love. In the end, is love a few hours spend together, leave it at that, make love, share and say goodbye, cut all strings loose?

And so Before Sunset seemed like it was to cut all this away, as it intruduced with the tagline...'what if you had a second chance, with the one that got away.' Before Sunset became the most commercial of the two films, confusing new audiences over which one film came first (America entitled the second one, Before Sunset 2) I remember the first time I saw Sunset, I had just finished my degree and gone back home, from Farnham, to London. My house was in a decorated mess, I had no bedroom, nowhere to really work, no job, only a laptop and a library down the road currently with an offer of free DVD's. As I watched Sunset, something came over me, as I ended up watching the film five times in a week. Was it the joy of seeing two people having the chance to be happy, did I just fall in love with Julie Delpy's character, was it the city of Paris, did it encourage optimism for love within me?

Being in a relationship at the time, I showed it to my girlfriend, who had not seen the first one. After watching it, she said...'it's not real.' What did she mean? Can two people not find such chemistry as is shown in the film or did she mean the film is so polite about the idea of chance, romance, chemistry?

I recently showed both the films on a date...perhaps if the date was the bit better, I might have got a better response than the one I got, which was that 'the first one was better.' It was at this point that I knew this date was over, perhaps I have the 'Before' films to thanks for this realisation.

When I saw Julie Delpy's on a panel discussion in Berlinale 2008, an audience member said to her, 'before sunrise and before sunset are two of my favourite films of all time, will there be a third one?' Julie Delpy was currently promoting her directing debut 'two days in Paris', a film which attempts to capture what a real relationship is like, can be argued in a more pessimist way, she replied to the audience member 'well, you're a romantic.' Perhaps that said it all...why I watched the second one five times in a week and why I'm writing this blog...

To end...

Jesse: Oh, God, why didn't we exchange phone numbers and stuff? Why didn't we do that?
Celine: Because we were young and stupid.
Jesse: Do you think we still are?
Celine: I guess when you're young, you just believe there'll be many people with whom you'll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.