I hope you’re ready for a random, out-of-the-blue stream of consciousness, because that’s exactly what this is as the following idea struck me yesterday and this is the result…
How often are you watching a movie where you want to just yell at the screen, “Just use your f–king cell phone!”? How equally frustrating is it when you’re watching a movie and someone has a cell phone but it’s either running out of battery or, Heaven forbid, can’t seem to get a signal? As technology improves, not only is the world getting smaller, but filmmakers are having to take technology into account to ensure audience members aren’t frustrated by its absence and it’s only getting worse.
Twitter is saving people from Egyptian justice and people with no toilet paper; Facebook is helping with presidential campaigns and starting flash mobs; Skype keeps people in touch for free no matter where they are in the world and text messaging is doing all of the above and more.
All things considered, the likelihood of two soul mates meeting in a foreign country nowadays, hooking up and promising to meet again six months later only to end up not seeing each other again until nine years later by sheer coincidence probably wouldn’t happen. A shame when it comes to two of my favorite films.
When Before Sunrise was released in 1995, web-based email was in its supreme infancy. Hotmail was launched in July 1996 and AOL Mail eight years later in 2004, the same year the sequel to Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, was released. In 1995 the Internet saw a massive boom, but it wasn’t until about a year later that web-based email began clicking.
So when you reach the end of Before Sunrise, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) can’t exchange email addresses or friend one another on Facebook. Of course, some may say they wouldn’t have done that anyway. After all, they decided not to call or write one another and to merely meet six months later, at Track Nine at six o’clock at night. Calling or writing would be “depressing”, as Jesse puts it, so they keep the excitement in the new relationship and leave it to fate.
They would do the same thing all over again, I hear you saying. Just because they may have email, Facebook, Skype or Twitter handles they wouldn’t have shared that information and would still simply make the promise to meet six months later. Fair enough, I can’t argue that. It’s one of the pinnacles of romanticism to trust in the unknown, but what happens once they don’t meet six months later?
In today’s world is it logical to think Celine wouldn’t do everything in her power to contact Jesse once she learned she wouldn’t be able to make their date? Is it logical to think Jesse wouldn’t try to find her when she didn’t arrive? We even learn Celine moves to New York for some time, just a few blocks from Jesse. Would she not try to contact him or find him?
As we saw in The Adjustment Bureau, a film I really liked but don’t love anywhere near as much as I love Before Sunrise/Sunset, what I described above is pretty much exactly what David Norris (Matt Damon) did when he lost Elise Sellas’ (Emily Blunt) number in The Adjustment Bureau. Of course, that was a movie in which fate was conspiring against the two leads and David had only spent a few minutes with Elise as opposed to a whole day and night. So we aren’t exactly comparing apples to apples, but it does make me wonder if The Adjustment Bureau is as close as we can get to a modern age equivalent to Before Sunrise/Sunset? Are we to the point where science-fiction must be employed to side-step advancements in technology to help us believe in a fate-driven romance?
This is all speculative of course, and perhaps me speaking from a nostalgic, Midnight in Paris perspective, in search of my own “Golden Age” when cinema was pure. But the idea of these two great films not being able to exist the same way they currently exist were they to be made today, set in 2011, is a bit disheartening. Times change and so do people, and with some of the changes we’ve seen in our world we’ve lost a little bit of humanity. It’s a shame really, but it’s the natural order of things.
