before sunrise

I spent the last three weeks of last summer aimlessly criss-crossing a soupy-hot europe on a eurorail pass that showed me most of everything through the window of trains. I was as sad as I was not very sad. I didn't really feel anything: disappointed in the world, maybe? In myself, definitely. As bored as I was overstimulated. Ethan Hawke Understands. Especially when he's wearing his turtleneck and making lewd hand gestures to sculpt an image of his childhood for some pretty actress. He's discontent. His Reality Bites. And the girl across the table is pretty. The wandering American meets the Sorbonne-educated hot french chick who's as unhappy with the stereotype of the french girl fling as she is perfectly fulfilling of this image.

This film is good. If you Understand, that is. If you've been on the whole European train journey rite-of-passage for America's Teen Force thing and you felt really fucking bored the whole time. I mean, the love scenes are goodish. Everything's bella. And yet, the meat of what this film gets right is the flittering, watery attention span of a jerk like Hawke. A jerk like me.

Yet the strongest flash is a series of shots wherein the camera reveals the spaces these characters inhabited, only this time, shows them empty, the next day. It recalls that photographer who edited the actors out of porn interiors, showing in the empty space the implied meaning of two bodies—showing, with the absence of those two bodies, the possibility for so many other unknown pairings.

To identify with this film, it is not so much that we could be those two characters, could sit on that railing the next day, could reinterpret, relive the weary tragedy, although we could. It is to understand the feeling of seeing these empty places, of feeling the need to fill our experience not with a wandering tourism, but with something inside our own life. If we identify with this film, it is with the empty spaces.