The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Richard Linklater · three films · 1995, 2004 and 2013 · about 290 minutes in all · written with Kim Krizan, then with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke
Mode
Romance of conversation made into a serial work across eighteen years; the walk and talk film, the brief encounter and the marriage drama in one
Mythos
The aubade, the lovers who must part at dawn; the return of the lost beloved; the marriage after the romance, among ruins; dawn, dusk and midnight as one day of a life
Phase
Three spans of less than a day, in 1995, 2004 and 2013: a night in Vienna, an afternoon in Paris told close to real time, a day in the Peloponnese
Presentation
Three feature films in colour, about 101, 80 and 109 minutes, mostly in English; long takes on the move; carried almost entirely by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy
Register
Talk, flirtation, confession and quarrel, at walking pace; tenderness and the ache of time rather than grandeur
Scale
Two people, three cities and eighteen years; a couple’s world, held in what they say to each other
Governing Proposition
Two strangers get off a train in Vienna and talk through one night; nine years later they meet again for one afternoon in Paris; nine years after that they are a couple with children, quarrelling through one day in Greece. The wager of the three films is that love made in a night is real and is not yet a life, that what the night promised is paid for in years, and that the only form which can show this is one in which the years are real: the same two faces, older by the time the story says has passed.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The work is three films, scored as one: Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), each as released in cinemas, directed by Richard Linklater. The first runs about 101 minutes, the second about 80, the third about 109. Each covers less than a day. Each is set nine years after the one before, and the actors, Ethan Hawke as Jesse and Julie Delpy as Celine, are nine years older each time. Each is set in one European place: Vienna, Paris, the southern Peloponnese. Other speaking parts are brief, except at one lunch table in Greece.
The first film begins on a train out of Budapest. A young man and a young woman, strangers, fall into talk, and when the train stops in Vienna they get off together and walk the city through the night, until the station the next morning. That is the whole of the plot. There is no obstacle but the clock. The film was written by Linklater and Kim Krizan, photographed by Lee Daniel, edited by Sandra Adair, with a score by Fred Frith, and it opened at Sundance in January 1995.
The bearing of each film on the whole is different, and the work states it by its titles. Before Sunrise is the meeting, free and episodic, the part of the work that gives most to the subtractive test. Before Sunset is the return, the tightest of the three. Before Midnight is the marriage, the widest. Dawn, dusk and midnight: the three films are one day of a life, spread over eighteen years of real time, and the work knows what it knows only because the years between the films were lived.
Movement II
On a tram the two trade confessions with nothing at stake. Then they walk. In a record shop they squeeze into a listening booth and play Kath Bloom’s “Come Here”, and in a space too small for them they do not quite look at each other. Nothing is said, and it is the summit of the film. On the great wheel at the Prater they kiss.
The night has its episodes: two street actors with their play, a palm reader, a poet by the Danube. They are charming and detachable, and the film would lose texture rather than meaning without any one of them. What is not detachable is the talk, and the talk is half performance: two young people making a self for each other, and the viewer is let half see it.
In the morning they part at the station, with a meeting in Vienna six months on. Then the film shows, one after another, the empty places they passed through in the night, now in daylight and without them. The ending is left open, and for nine years it stood open: whether they met is not said, and the film was loved for not saying.
Movement III
Nine years later Jesse has written a novel about the night in Vienna, and the two meet again at Shakespeare and Company in Paris. He has a plane to catch. The film runs close to real time, about eighty minutes, and every walk is spent against the clock: through the streets, onto a boat on the Seine, into a car, up the stair to Celine’s flat. It was written by Linklater, Delpy and Hawke, from a story by Linklater and Krizan; it was shown at Berlin in 2004 and nominated for the Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay.
At first the talk is small, and the small talk carries the unsaid. Slowly, as late as each dares, they tell each other what the missed meeting cost: each built a life around a night, and each life is thin. In the car Celine lifts her hand toward Jesse’s head, and pulls it back. It is the smallest gesture in the work and one of its heights.
In her flat she plays him a waltz on the guitar, then puts on Nina Simone and dances, and tells him he is “gonna miss that plane”. Jesse says “I know”. The film cuts to black before the answer. The open ending of the first film is closed, and a second open ending stands in its place, and the work has turned from one film into a shape across time.
Movement IV
Nine years later again, they are a couple. Before Midnight was written by Linklater, Delpy and Hawke, photographed by Christos Voudouris, edited by Adair, with a score by Graham Reynolds; it opened at Sundance in 2013 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Adapted Screenplay. It begins at an airport, with Jesse and his son by his first marriage, who lives in Chicago, and Jesse’s guilt toward the boy is the first thing the film discloses.
Then a car, in one long take, the twin daughters asleep in the back, and the space of the work has narrowed: the walk of the first film and the walk against the clock of the second have become two people boxed into the front seats, and the quarrel to come is seeded in their talk. At the lunch table other couples, old and young, state the themes the rest of the day will enact. It is the one place where the form sets the talk in a static ensemble.
In the evening, on the Mani, they watch the sun go down in silence. Celine says “Still there”, and then that it is gone. The elevation of the work is here at its widest: not grandeur, but two people of forty watching a day end and saying so. The disclosure of the third film, that love at this age is a decision renewed rather than a feeling found, is about to be tested.
Movement V
In a hotel room the quarrel comes. Celine charges that the labour of their family has fallen on her, and Jesse’s guilt toward his son is in the room with them. Delpy carries the scene from tenderness to cruelty and back within one span. The quarrel was seeded in the car, and the whole day was needed before it.
Celine’s fear of being consumed, stated on a tram in Vienna eighteen years of real time earlier, is her charge now. Jesse’s apology at the café afterwards is the same move as his flirting on that tram: a performance that is also the truth. He reads her a letter from the future, and she half surrenders. Whether it is reconciliation or truce the film does not say, and it is still argued.
The three films end as they began, with two people talking against a clock, and one law holds from the first tram to the last café: love is made and tested in talk, and what is said is half performance and half truth. What the work has shown no single film could show: the same two faces across eighteen years, and a day of a life, from dawn to midnight, that took eighteen years to film.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test runs film by film and then across. Before Sunset resists it best: eighty minutes and a plane to catch, so that every walk, from the bookshop to the boat to the car to Celine’s stair, is spent against the clock and none can go without shortening the time they have. Before Midnight is required in its spine, the car, the hotel room and the café, and the quarrel needs the whole day before it. Across the three no film can go, since each is a term of one argument about time. What gives: the street actors, the palm reader and the poet in Before Sunrise, which add texture rather than meaning, and the lunch table in Greece.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: love made in one night is real and is not yet a life, and what the night promised is paid for in years, in children, in work divided unequally and in the words people use to hurt each other. The first film shows the self two young strangers make for each other in talk, and lets the viewer half see the performance. The second, what a missed meeting cost. The third, the marriage the first two could only imagine: labour fallen on one partner, guilt toward a son by an earlier marriage, love at forty as a decision renewed. The years on the actors’ faces are part of what is shown. Held only where the talk states what the image has already shown.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The work rises often, and low. In Before Sunrise the summit is the listening booth, where two strangers play Kath Bloom’s “Come Here” and do not quite look at each other; then the kiss on the wheel at the Prater, and the morning montage of the empty places they passed through. In Before Sunset, Celine’s hand lifted toward Jesse’s head and withdrawn, her waltz, and the dance to Nina Simone before the cut to black. In Before Midnight, a sun going down over the Mani, watched in silence. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is height: the elevation is tenderness and the ache of time, never grandeur or terror, and frequency, which is high, cannot make up the difference.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The myth is built, and its first form is an old one: the aubade, the lovers who must part at dawn, which Before Sunrise takes up whole, its title naming the hour and its story running from meeting to the morning train. Before Sunset builds the return of the lost beloved, the old promise broken by chance, held on a deadline as the old stories hold it. Before Midnight turns to the marriage after the romance. The titles make the three one day of a life, dawn, dusk and midnight, and that structure bears the load: it is the work’s own myth, and the particular is never lost to it. Held from the top because the archetypes are inherited, and the Greek ruins of the third film are setting more than structure.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the screen romance, the brief encounter and the film of the love not taken, and beside it the European film of talk and walking, Rohmer above all, with Linklater’s own Slacker (1990). The first swerve is an American romance with no plot beyond talk, no obstacle beyond the clock and an open ending. The larger swerve is the shape: two sequels made nine years apart, each written with the leads, with none of the sequel’s business in them and the actors’ real ageing made the matter of the work. The stake was real: the second film risked spoiling an ending loved for its openness, the third a romance turned into a marriage quarrel. Held from the top because each film alone walks a path Rohmer proved.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. The knowledge is that love lives in time, and the form is time: each film confined to less than a day, the second to close to its own running time, the gaps of nine years real, so that the faces seen in 2013 are the faces of 1995 aged by the years the story says have passed. No make-up could know this. The long take on the move, two people walking and talking in one shot, leaves no cut to escape into. And the form narrows across the three, from a free walk to a walk against a clock to a car and a hotel room, and the narrowing space is the marriage. Held only where the lunch table sets talk in a static ensemble.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over thirteen to thirty-one years. The open endings have kept argument alive: whether the two met in Vienna six months later, which the second film answered, and whether Jesse misses his plane, which the third answers only by implication. The close of the third film, a letter from the future and a half surrender, is still argued as reconciliation or truce. Return yields what first viewing hides: how much of the first film’s talk is performance, how the second film’s small talk carries the unsaid, how the third film’s quarrel is seeded in the car. And each later film changes the earlier ones. Held where the whole has existed thirteen years, and where the return, to character and talk, renews within a narrow field.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1990s to the 2010s. The intrinsic force is a demonstration in two parts: that a feature can be carried by two people talking in real places in long takes with no plot, and that the actors’ ageing can be the medium of a serial work. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Before Sunrise became a reference for the walk and talk romance and for the American independent cinema of conversation after it, the trilogy is the model named when a film returns to the same characters over decades, and Linklater’s own Boyhood (2014), at 8.4 on this desk, extends it. The reach redirected one strand and the idea of the sequel, not what most films do.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. Each film survives whole as released. Presence has been continuous since each release: in circulation, as a common reference among film-goers, and in the teaching of screenwriting and performance. The span is split across the parts: thirty-one years for the first film, twenty-two for the second, thirteen for the third. Weighted by running time, that span would carry a little more than the figure; the work as one work has existed only since 2013, and its last term has the shortest demonstration, so survival is credited a tenth below the weighted mean. The surface is lightly fixed to its moments, the absent phones of 1995 and the laptops of 2013, but that dating is part of the design.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Read to the elder anchors. The writing is the first craft: dialogue that sounds overheard and is built, with themes laid in the first minutes of each film and paid out at its end; the second and third scripts written by Linklater with Delpy and Hawke. The performances are the second: Hawke and Delpy sustain takes of many minutes without seams, and Delpy in the third film’s hotel room, moving from tenderness to cruelty and back within one scene, is the height. Lee Daniel’s camera in Vienna and Paris and Christos Voudouris’s in Greece hold long takes on the street without fuss, and Sandra Adair keeps three films’ rhythms. The costs: a plain image that seldom makes meaning of its own, a slight score, uneven supporting players in the first film.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a tram in Vienna, two strangers trading confessions with nothing at stake, and a hotel room in Greece, a married couple saying things meant to wound. One law governs both: people make and test their love in talk, against a clock, and what is said is half performance and half truth. Jesse’s flirting on the tram and his apology at the café are the same move; Celine’s fear of being consumed, stated in the first film, is her charge in the third. The clock is the same law in each: the train, the plane, the night in the hotel. The range, from first meeting to middle-aged marriage, is wide for two people, and the law holds. It loosens only at the lunch table, where other voices state the themes.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged on what about 290 minutes and two leads hold. Two consciousnesses, each changing across eighteen years; romance, then marriage and family, in twin daughters and in Jesse’s son by his first marriage; work, in Jesse’s novels about the night in Vienna and Celine’s work for environmental groups and the job she is offered; the city, in Vienna and Paris walked; history, in a European ground of churches, ruins and a chapel in the Peloponnese; the generations, at the lunch table. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that all of it is held through two people’s talk: the state, labour and history are discussed, not dramatised, and the work encompasses a couple’s world more than the world. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form at 9.1, The Unconcealment and The Inner Law at 9.0. A form in which the years between the films are real and visible on the same two faces, so that time is the instrument of the knowledge; a disclosure, that the night’s promise is paid for in years, which can be stated and holds; and one law of love tested in talk against a clock, from a tram in Vienna to a hotel room in Greece.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: a couple’s world is held, and the state, labour and history are discussed rather than dramatised. Below the rest, The Sublime at 8.0, an elevation frequent and tender that never reaches grandeur, and The Imperishable at 8.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3: a whole thirteen years old, and a reach that redirected one strand of film and the idea of the sequel.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Inner Law at 9.0, The Made at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Unconcealment at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 and The Imperishable at 8.2 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and the aggregate of 8.6 holds the work in Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the three films as released in cinemas, scored as one work: Before Sunrise (1995), written by Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan, photographed by Lee Daniel, with music by Fred Frith; Before Sunset (2004), written by Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke from a story by Linklater and Krizan, photographed by Lee Daniel; Before Midnight (2013), written by Linklater, Delpy and Hawke, photographed by Christos Voudouris, with music by Graham Reynolds; all three edited by Sandra Adair and directed by Linklater. The theatrical versions are the object, and the bearing of each film is stated under every axis. Each film was seen more than once; the lunch conversation of the third is known in its outline rather than its detail, and is described only so. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. The dialogue is in English with some French and Greek, and nothing is charged to translation. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain. Figures that could not be verified, among them the scene and shot counts, the share of the dialogue, the shooting schedules and the length of the long take that opens the drive in the third film, are not given, nor are festival prizes beyond those stated.