Fine Romances

Every year I tell myself the Academy Awards are simply the opinion of the Hollywood community; that they cost an indecent amount of money that would be better spent making movies; and that they really do not have much to do with the merits of the works they are “honouring”. I remind myself that great artists like Greta Garbo, Sam Peckinpah, Cary Grant, Robert Ryan, Michael Redgrave, Anthony Mann, Irene Dunne, Charles Boyer and Val Lewton never received an Oscar, at least not in competition. Then I remember that John Ford, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, William Wyler and Frank Capra most certainly did; and then I allow myself to get caught up in the spurious excitement all over again.

But the award of best picture to the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men is the absolute limit. It is a confused, pretentious work with an unhealthy fascination with violence, an incoherent plot and, yes, some very fine acting and cinematography. It was meant, I suppose, to be realistic poetry, but for me, it is the cinematic equivalent of doggerel. Still I must admit that I have been biased against the Coens ever since they made Miller’s Crossing. Not that that was a bad film; quite the reverse. Miller’s Crossing is almost certainly the best re-imagining of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key ever made. It gets the 1920s atmosphere right, and unlike the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma the new material is an enrichment of the original. Which is not surprising, as it comes from another Hammett novel, Red Harvest.

The only problem is that none of this has been acknowledged in the credits. It was not technically plagiarism; but an “inspired by” credit wouldn’t have done any harm, and would have acknowledged the film-makers’ debt to a great American artist. So to have the Coens win multiple Oscars after making their name by lifting material from two of the great crime novels of the last century, and to achieve all this with such a pretentious movie, was all too much. I decided to devote the column this month to a series of films that were small-budget, original, civilised, witty, romantic and emphatically non-violent.

By a happy chance the most recent, Julie Delpy’s Two Days in Paris (2007), was at the time of writing screening at the Roseville cinema, and for once the DVD from overseas arrived in time for me to explore the special features. What’s more, the DVDs of two closely related films, Before Sunset (2004) and Before Sunrise (1994), were both readily available in local video stores. And I already own a copy of the daddy of all romantic movies, An Affair to Remember (1957), and a video of the 1939 original, Love Story.

So what makes these films so special?

They are all unabashedly romantic or post-romantic. Their characters are civilised, articulate and likeable. Above all they have something to say about human relations. And what makes each of the movies even more fascinating is that they are all interrelated. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are co-written and directed by Richard Linklater and star Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy playing the same characters nine years apart. Two Days in Paris has similar themes and is written and directed by Delpy, who also plays one of the leads. What’s more, Delpy and Hawke co-wrote Before Sunset with Richard Linklater. In addition there seems to be an oblique relationship between these recent movies and the classic An Affair to Remember.

It all began with independent film-maker Richard Linklater deciding to make Before Sunrise (on a minuscule budget) in 1994. Both the leads were just starting their careers. Julie Delpy’s finest performance until then had been in Bertrand Tavernier’s Beatrice, one of that director’s few commercial failures. (For me Beatrice is one of the great screen tragedies; with extraordinary performances by Delpy and Bernard Pierre Donnadieu.) Ethan Hawke was best known for his work in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets’ Society.

The plot of Before Sunrise was simplicity itself. Celine, a young French student studying at the Sorbonne, meets Jesse on the train to Vienna and they spend the night wandering the streets of the city. They tell each other about their lives, their experiences, gently flirt with each other and, perhaps, fall in love. Deftly Linklater compresses something like fifteen hours into two hours of film and creates the illusion of real time.

This is of course exactly the sort of film any studio would run a mile before even considering. “How can two actors hold an audience’s attention for two hours?” “You have got Vienna but why can’t we have some spies?” And so on—the neverending search for the comfortable cliché. All of which I’m sure is why the studios were never asked. And as Linklater knew, these two actors can hold an audience for as long as they want to. Delpy’s enchanting Celine—knowing, yet open, vulnerable, yet wary and ultimately very much in love—and Hawke’s Jesse—slightly cynical, a little clumsy, but warmly ardent—are always engaging.

Wisely Linklater trusted his performers. There was a three-week rehearsal, and their scenes together are mainly shot in a variety of elegantly framed two-shots. As they walk through Vienna in the late afternoon and night, Lee Daniel’s camera follows them in unobtrusively choreographed travelling shots. The great city may be simply a setting, but Daniel keeps the frame open so the spectator is always at least marginally aware of Vienna’s sumptuous beauty.

Such is Hawke and Delpy’s on-screen rapport that the dialogue seems to be improvised. It’s not. To be sure, in the later film Delpy and Hawke co-wrote the screenplay but both films include fine writing with, perhaps, some improvisations; but only after the actors had mastered the text and made it their own. There are also some sharp observations that would do credit to a Noel Coward:

Celine: Supposedly, men lose their ability to hear higher-pitched sounds, and women lose their hearing at the low end. I guess they sort of nullify each other, or something.

Jesse: I guess. Nature’s way of allowing couples to grow old together without killing each other.

With only a little re-editing that exchange could go into Brief Encounter. But the film is at its best evoking the intense romanticism of the young. To give Jesse some idea of her feelings Celine takes him into a listening booth in a record store and plays him a song that goes like this:

There’s a wind that blows in from the north
And it says loving takes its course
Come here come here. Come here.

All the while the camera in a slight low-angle two-shot records their reactions.

Linklater, by all accounts a formidably well-read man, creates his characters and tells his stories through the dialogue. Take this observation by Celine:

“I believe if there is any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us. Not you or I … but just in this little space in between. If there is any kind of magic in this world it is in the attempt of understanding someone. I know it’s almost impossible to succeed but … who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.”

This respect for language is not confined to Linklater’s own writing; when a beggar offers to compose a poem based on any word the couple likes to choose and in return they can pay him what they think it is worth, the poem is by David Jewell, a celebrated poet from Austin, Texas.

After all this, naturally Jesse and Celine make love. Afterwards there is a new intimacy between the characters and—a nice touch—Celine has packed away the skivvy she was wearing earlier under her low-cut top, giving her body greater freedom. The film concludes with them deciding to meet again at the railway station six months later. Fans of Before Sunrise (it soon became a cult film), were left to wonder whether they would meet again or forget the magical evening. There were reports that the film was based on a real incident when the director and a beautiful woman wandered all night around Philadelphia. But no one was quite sure how that turned out—and anyway did it matter?

Then all doubts were resolved. The characters had been haunting the actors and director as well as the fans. A new film, Before Sunset, was announced. At long last Jesse and Celine were to meet again—nine years later! This had to mean one, or both of them, didn’t keep their rendezvous.

And this is where Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember comes in, because at exactly halfway through this great classic Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr’s Nicky and Terry declare their love and agree to meet in six months on the top of the Empire State Building. Like Celine, as it turns out, Terry doesn’t make it. She is knocked down by a taxi and ends up in a wheelchair. Since this is romantic melodrama, Terry doesn’t want to be a burden and won’t see the man she loves until she can “run and I mean run” to him. The less said about what she does do in the meantime (teaching singing to a choir of underprivileged children under the auspices of a Going my Way-type priest) the better. But the pain of this separation through a melodramatic accident is the same as for Celine and Jesse. It’s more plausible for them—her grandmother dies and she has no way of contacting him—but the sense of loss is the same.

Consequentially Before Sunset is almost the exact equivalent of the scenes in An Affair to Remember and its predecessor Love Story where Nicky discovers why his lover failed to keep her rendezvous. Both were brilliantly played, by Charles Boyer and Irene Dunne in the first version and by Grant and Kerr in the second, using almost identical scripts by Delmer Daves. For me the later version is better. Kerr and Grant have a light, unsentimental, almost comedic touch that makes the revelation that she is crippled still profoundly moving fifty years after the film was made.

So how do Linklater, Delpy and Hawke compare as director, actors and writers with McCarey, Daves, Grant and Kerr? Very well indeed, and that is no mean achievement. Forget Affair’s reputation as a sentimental weepie. Apart from a few sequences towards the end, it’s a very tough film; it’s just not obvious because of the adroit way everyone had to get around the censorship. But for the attentive viewer Nicky is a womanising playboy who at the beginning of the film has to make a wealthy marriage to sustain his lifestyle. And Terry is a rich man’s mistress who may be about to marry her lover, but has been kept by him for five years. Once Nicky and Terry fall in love they both have to restore their self-respect before they can marry. The film may have stylish sets and be played with great style; but Grant and Kerr were far too truthful performers, and Daves and McCarey too fine artists to have made An Affair to Remember just another melodrama. Still in 1957 they had well-tried plot devices to propel the narrative. In 2004 Linklater and his performers had only the lives and emotions of their characters.

This time the director decided that Before Sunset would unfold in real time; seventy-one minutes of film for the characters to meet, reveal themselves and, perhaps, make some decisions. The city they wander around this time is Paris; hauntingly, Paris in the afternoon when the light is soft; the time the great silent directors scheduled stars like Lillian Gish’s close-ups.

There are no elaborate plot devices. Jesse has written a book about that night in Vienna and at the beginning of the film is at the Shakespeare Bookshop in Paris conducting a Q-and-A and a book-signing when Celine arrives. Before catching his plane “at seven-thirty at the latest” she takes him around Paris. What follows is a tour de force of acting, direction and cinematography. Most of the action is covered in Lee Daniel’s superbly choreographed travelling shots. Takes continue for eight to ten minutes, with the afternoon light delicately shifting as it would in reality and as it did when they were shooting. Unlike Leo McCarey’s classic this is almost a documentary. Dialogue was written by Delpy, Hawke and Linklater and again there was a three-week rehearsal period, but there is no sense of contrivance. “Where was the camera?” asked one friend viewing the film with me.

So what happens to Celine and Jesse? You will have to find out for yourselves. Some overseas commentators say the ending demands yet another sequel. Others insist that Before Sunset’s resolution involving a cup of tea and a Nina Simone song at Celine’s flat is ideal. What I will say is that Delpy and Hawke give two of the greatest romantic performances in the history of movies. I have not come across any reports that any of them saw Grant and Kerr; but if they did, they learnt all the right lessons—where to play against the emotion, when to treat the feelings obliquely and above all when to allow characters to drop their guard completely.

Is Delpy’s own first film as writer-director as good as this? Actually the works are not really comparable. To be sure the themes are related; there are even references to the earlier movie. But Two Days in Paris is in a totally different style, fast-cuts, a restlessly moving camera, and dialogue written and delivered like a screwball comedy. Indeed it is a screwball comedy—sometimes! As writer, Delpy gives full rein to her raunchy sense of humour and there are some wonderful sex jokes which I’m not going to spoil for you by retelling.

Delpy describes Two Days in Paris as a post-romantic comedy; and I suppose it is since it is about what happens after you commit to a relationship. Adam Goldberg is Jack, having a very bad time in Paris coping with his partner Marion’s wacky parents (played by Delpy herself and her real father and mother) and all her ex-lovers, who keep dropping out of the woodwork. Goldberg is hilarious and Delpy herself as his feisty partner is a delight, and what’s more she knows how to pace a comedy. For me it was perhaps a little too hectic, but the serious note on which the film ends rang true and the humour was always based on character, which puts it way ahead of most American comedies at present.

Now for something completely different. This year is the centenary of the birth of Sir Michael Redgrave, one of the greatest of British screen actors, and has coincided with my finding one of the rarest of his films, Thunder Rock, made in 1942 and it seems never released in Australia. It is based on a play written by Robert Ardrey that played in London during the Blitz. Redgrave described to me how when the bombers came over he would have to stop the play and direct the audience to the nearest shelters.

The film is an extraordinary achievement. It tells of a journalist, David Charleston (Redgrave) who has tried to warn about the dangers of fascism, but after his copy has been consistently rewritten by his editors and his book ignored, takes refuge as a lighthouse keeper on Thunder Rock. There he lives in a world of his own imagination peopled by the captain and passengers of a nineteenth-century shipwreck. In the course of the play/film they persuade him to return and take up the fight against fascism. Shot almost entirely on rather cheap studio sets—not unusual for wartime film-making—it is still an extraordinary film, featuring one of Redgrave’s finest performances.

Charleston’s experiences in the film are based on London Times correspondents Douglas Reed and Ewan Butler, whose copy was rewritten and distorted by the editor, Geoffrey Dawson. Seeing Thunder Rock for the first time this week and finding Charleston’s despair echoed in what I was reading in Chester Wilmot’s diaries describing his experiences in Europe during the Anschluss. The Munich crisis provided a unique opportunity to re-enact the thoughts of the past in my own mind.

Now for a modern example of totalitarianism. There was a report in the Sydney Morning Herald of March 10 that Tang Wei, star of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (reviewed in the March issue of Quadrant) has been banned in the Chinese media because of the “sexual nature of her performance”. One wonders if another reason was the film’s unflattering portrayal of the communist resistance and the extent of Chinese collaboration with the Japanese in the Second World War. Robust democracies like France and Holland have already faced in their media the sorrow and the pity of the Nazi occupation without victimising their artists.

But of course China is not a democracy, for all its embrace of the worst features of capitalism. Is it worth arguing that Miss Wei’s playing of those scenes took great courage, that they were essential for the plot and characterisation, and that only a depraved mind (or bureaucrat) would regard them as salacious? It all brings back memories of Stalin lecturing the great S.M. Eisenstein on the faults in Ivan the Terrible Part II. One can only wish Miss Wei good fortune. She is a very fine actress. If I were a Hollywood film-maker, or an Australian one for that matter, I’d be busy writing scripts that require a beautiful Chinese star to play the lead!

Meanwhile, see Lust, Caution.