Richard Linklater (USA, born 1960)

Boyhood (2014)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Following quite neatly on from Blue is the Warmest Colour, Boyhood is another film which is almost three hours long, and is another coming-of-age tale which examines the trials and tribulations of a person’s transition from teenager to adult. It’s unquestionably a very different film than the lesbian melodrama, but I nevertheless saw several small parallels, one of which is that both films examine heartbreak.

Boyhood is much more interested in its main character’s relationship to their family members, though, and is far more of an ensemble piece. And it just…ingratiates itself into your psyche. It doesn’t jump and shout. It establishes itself at a low level and gradually evolves from there, never overreaching, building its stature little by little, step by step.

This is, I suppose, apt for a movie which has at its heart a central conceit as pronounced as this movie’s is. For those who don’t know, it was filmed piecemeal over a period of 12 years and the principal character, just like the film, actually grows before your eyes. Prior to viewing it, I had apprehensions; I feared it was going to be a gimmick. I also, for some reason, thought it was going to both duller and more contrived than it actually was; this was despite a great fondness for several of Linklater’s previous films, especially Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, and his little-seen 1996 cut, Suburbia, a Kevin Smith-meets-Samuel Beckett tour de force and well worth a look.

Anyway, as with other films covered previously, Boyhood is notable for what it doesn’t show you as much as for what it does. The ‘big’ moments are missing- christenings, weddings, divorces, funerals, graduation ceremonies, birthday milestones. There is no uplifting sequence where Mason learns to ride a bike without training wheels. There is no use of montage. There is no onscreen ‘first kiss’ for Mason, no life-changing loss of virginity. There are no heart-rending scenes where he finds out his best friend is gay and promises him that it won’t change anything and he’ll be by his side forever. He doesn’t find out his sister or mom has been using drugs and make the wrenching decision to get her into rehab. We don’t hear voiceover extracts from Mason’s private diary. There is never any formal indication that we have moved forward in time, and we are never told exactly what year it is. This technique- if you can call it a technique- is so subtle and such an intrinsic part of the film’s tapestry that I didn’t even notice when I was actually watching it.

Nor did I realise how much I liked the film until it was over. That’s how smoothly it ebbs and flows. One could argue that there are little imperfections- at one point, Linklater hands us a character who we are quite clearly supposed to hate, and in this it’s possible that some nuance has been compromised. People like this do unquestionably exist, though, so he has every right to portray them; in any case, one doesn’t feel that he was trying to create the perfect movie, necessarily, or a ‘masterpiece’, but just one that was meaningful, relatable, substantial, and honest.

In this, he passes with flying colours, and the film is, arguably, something of a masterpiece. It’s also one of the easiest, most digestible movies on this list so far, a great ‘entry-level’ film for those tired of the usual studio fare, but relatively uninitiated in arthouse stylings.

Highly recommended.

Before Sunset (2004)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Like The Dark Knight, Before Sunset is the middle film in a sequence of three, and just like the Batman trilogy, I had previously seen the first and second entries, but not the third. Unlike The Dark Knight, though, in this instance I chose to revisit the first movie, Before Sunrise, and then having watched part two again, subsequently also watched the final entry, Before Midnight, giving me something of a panoramic view, a full digestion of the sandwich in which Before Sunset theoretically forms the central filling.

It’s the shortest instalment of the three- only 77 minutes, about 20 minutes short of Before Sunrise and 30 minutes lighter than Before Midnight. And it is probably unique in my film-viewing experience in that it consists almost entirely of one long conversation. There’s a short intro scene and then, following that, the whole film is simply a single extended interchange between two people. Before Sunrise had a similar dynamic- featuring the same two people, by the way- but it was made up of several shorter conversations, with offscreen passages of time in between, rather than one long one; Certified Copy, a clear filmic cousin, shared this distinction, too.

Before Sunset is a good film- it’s thoughtful, it’s considered, and it was clearly made with expression and substance in mind, not commercial enterprise; hence, its levels of artistic merit are palpable throughout. Good acting, too. Nonetheless, I ultimately feel that it may be slightly less than the sum of these particular parts. Is that because its minimalistic stylings and slender length result in an undercooked effect? Possibly, though I’d take an ‘undercooked’ film that it as good as Before Sunset any day over the huge raft of films that make no effort at depth or truth and are wholly bereft of wit, warmth, culture and passion.

I remember finding Before Sunset a slight film when I watched it many years ago, and being disappointed that it wasn’t as satisfying as the brighter and easier Before Sunrise. In particular, I was surprised when it came to its understated end- for one thing, I hadn’t known the film was only 77 minutes and expected another half-hour, calling to mind Children of Men and my vocally-expressed reaction of ‘Are they seriously just going to end the film there?’ In my case, I had to be older to appreciate endings like this- not only have I ceased to be vexed by them, but I actively like them. Gone are the days when I need a film to end on a pronounced note, and when I felt that the filmmakers somewhat owed it to my time and patience to end their film ‘properly’ and ‘fairly’.

Not that there is anything improper or unfair about Before Sunset’s denouement. Not now, anyway. My feelings back then were that the film was building up to something that never came about, and I didn’t realise that the exploratory exchanges Jesse and Celine engage in as they walk through pastel Parisian backstreets and take a short ride on a boat weren’t ‘build-up’ at all. They weren’t leading toward anything. They weren’t serving any plot contrivances. They were the movie. That’s all folks. Take it or leave it. So long and good night.

So I watched Before Sunrise again, a film I’ve only seen once, over fifteen years ago, and I received it enthusiastically; yes, it’s a little contrived, what with its meet-cute and all, but it’s dated well, considering its mid-nineties Generation-X cultural base, and it was a pleasure to watch. That Before Sunset is something of a drier, more subdued movie makes logical sense when one considers that these characters have shifted reluctantly from their possibility-laden, energetic twenties to their reflective, mordant thirties, with regret, lost time and the merest hint of impending death clouding the waters of their respective psyches. They’re not miserable people, exactly, let alone depressed, but their constant self-assessments, if nothing else, suggest dissatisfaction. Not for the first time, I feel in a much better position to receive and absorb a film with these sorts of themes than I used to be. I know why I didn’t like it before- I was around 21, and I didn’t really want to hear about the dispirited topics that these thirty-somethings were discussing. I didn’t want to see iridescent romance replaced by practicality and pragmatism. I felt I had been led to expect something different from a noticeably ‘fresher’ and more vibrant first film.

The three movies are set in different European locales- Vienna for Before Sunrise, Paris for Before Sunset, and the southern Peloponnese for Before Midnight, providing scenery that is full-blown exotic to someone who is, as I am, from rainy northern England. Such window-dressing and two-hander structure is where comparisons to Certified Copy can most firmly be drawn and of the three, it is Before Sunset’s Paris that is the most visually redolent of Abbas Kiarostami’s Tuscan vision, though much of that, I feel, is in the way that Jesse are Celine are sometimes enclosed by the high walls of the tight-knit streets they move through, providing us with a closer visual parallel to Binoche and Shimell than its antecedent or successor.

The conversation in Before Sunset is presented as completely natural- no filters, no edits, just raw and uncut, as if you were there, though they’re undoubtedly speaking more candidly than they would be if they weren’t alone. Certified Copy’s bisected structure and character transformation ‘interferes’ with such an effect, and perhaps because of this, the Kiarostami film felt like a weightier piece as it explored the fissures that occur when you love someone but don’t like them anymore, whereas with Before Sunset, in and of itself, there is a question as to whether Jesse and Celine are actually in love, though it’s certainly implied. Can you really be in love with somebody that you’ve only met twice? Before Midnight goes on to provide further comment on such an issue without necessarily resolving it, deliberately taking a very complex stance on what may or may not constitute love, and the difficulties thereof.

I had a few difficulties of my own, chief among them Celine’s claim that she didn’t have sex with Jesse all those years ago- a claim she later recants with the comment that this is ‘just something that women do sometimes’. What, gaslighting and lying? Sorry, I don’t have the slightest patience with that sort of thing at all. I liked Celine in the first film, and as the trilogy drew on my feelings towards her became more mixed, whereas my opinion of Jesse generally stayed about the same. This isn’t a bad thing, per se- logic dictates that such things will sometimes result from films that place rich character nuance so highly in their list of aims. But it leaves a sour aftertaste, quite fitting for a movie which itself strikes a decidedly bittersweet note, like a cocktail with an unusual ingredient that you’re not sure should be there.

Still perfectly drinkable.