nina

i liked their conversations here a bit more than in before sunrise. there’s something so much more mature and reflective about them now— less idealistic, more honest. it feels like they’re carrying the weight of nine years in every sentence. i feel like sunrise is the one you love when you’re younger, then you grow older and suddenly sunset destroys you, and then one day midnight probably will too. the trilogy really just evolves with you. and god this movie hurts. why is he married. why is she dating. life literally sucks. what gets me is how in sunrise, jesse keeps talking about how one day celine will be old and married and still thinking about that night and wondering “what if,” but then he’s the one who gets married. he’s the one who leaves with the unfinished story haunting him. “what is lost is lost” genuinely felt like a punch to the chest. i also love how celine’s romanticism has changed. in sunrise she felt softer, more hopeful, while jesse was the cynic—making fun of poets and palm readers and all that. but now the tables have turned. celine talks about all these men who dated her, learned how to love through her, then left to marry someone else, and when she says “why couldn’t you ask me to marry you?” i immediately thought of jesse in Sunrise saying, “listen, if somebody gave me the choice right now, of to never see you again or to marry you, alright, i would marry you, alright. and maybe that’s a lot of romantic bullshit, but people have gotten married for a lot less.” like OH MY GOD. the irony of that line years later actually kills me. after so many disappointments, celine’s lost that belief in love lasting forever, and honestly everything she says about love not working out feels painfully real. i even relate to her rage sometimes, and the way she gets attached to people so deeply. but despite all of that, after nine years, their chemistry is still there. it’s effortless. the banter is still so natural and intimate, and jesse still looks at celine the exact same way he did nine years ago. there’s so much history in every glance. and then celine saying “maybe we’re only good at brief encounters” ??? actual punch in the gut. the ending destroys me too. the song she sings somehow captures their entire relationship in just a few minutes, and the way jesse watches her during it says everything. and then suddenly it’s like BABY YOU ARE GONNA MISS THAT PLANE!!!!!! but also… maybe he was always going to.

there are some movies that feel less like movies and more like memories you somehow forgot you had. before sunrise doesn’t feel scripted or acted or constructed at all. it feels like accidentally overhearing the most intimate conversation of your life on a train and then spending the next two hours mourning the fact that you will never know these people personally. this movie genuinely altered my brain chemistry i fear. i watched it and suddenly understood why people write poems and smoke cigarettes on balconies and stare out of car windows dramatically. richard linklater i hope both sides of your pillow are cold forever. i feel like the way jesse looks at celine and vice versa is one of the biggest storytellers in this movie. maybe i’m just a whore for eye contact but genuinely, the way they look at each other says more than half the dialogue ever could. and this movie already has some of the best dialogue i’ve ever heard. there’s just something so devastatingly intimate about being seen like that. not glanced at, not admired from afar, but looked at. like the other person is trying to memorize you before the world takes you away. i know “the look of love” is such a classic romance movie thing. we see it in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days when ben sees andy in the yellow dress, in The Notebook when allie finally agrees to go out with noah, when cameron looks at bianca in 10 Things I Hate About You. but before sunrise is practically built on those moments. jesse and celine spend so much of the movie just looking at each other that eventually you start feeling like you’re intruding on something private. every glance feels loaded, every smile feels accidental and inevitable at the same time. and i think that’s what makes this movie one of the greatest romances ever made. it understands that falling in love is not always explosive. sometimes it’s just talking, walking around a city, sitting in silence, laughing at stupid thing, asking someone questions because for some reason you desperately want to know the answer. they’ve only known each other for a day, and yet they talk like people who have been orbiting each other for years without realizing it. also the WRITING??? oh my gosh richard linklater i owe you my firstborn actually. the screenplay feels so natural that half the time it doesn’t even feel written. it feels overheard. like we just happened to stumble into the most beautiful conversation in the world. every line reveals something tiny and human about them. the movie is basically the epitome of “show don’t tell” because even when they’re discussing life or death or reincarnation or exes or soulmates, what they’re really revealing is the quiet fear underneath it all: the fear of not being understood, the fear of missing your chance at connection, the fear that people can pass through your life and disappear forever. also julie delpy and ethan hawke??? one of the most gorgeous pairings ever put onscreen i’m so serious. not even just physically, though yes they are both offensively beautiful, but their auras complement each other so perfectly. julie delpy gives celine this softness and intelligence that feels so alive, and ethan hawke gives jesse this restless charm that makes you understand immediately why celine stays. they act like two people genuinely fascinated by each other. their chemistry is so good i honestly think i could watch this movie on mute and still feel every emotion. celine especially means so much to me. she’s funny and opinionated and romantic and cynical and emotional all at once. she feels like such a real woman. not a manic pixie dream girl, not some perfect philosophical fantasy, but an actual person trying to make sense of herself and the world around her. every word out of her mouth is iconic to me actually. when she says, “I always feel this pressure of being a strong and independent icon of womanhood, and without making it look my whole life is revolving around some guy. But loving someone, and being loved means so much to me. We always make fun of it and stuff. But isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?” i genuinely had to pause the movie for a second because oh my gosh. that line perfectly captures the weird contradiction of wanting to be self-sufficient and strong while also wanting to love and be loved so deeply it consumes you. like yes i can preach feminism and female independence and misandry and STILL want devastating soul-consuming romance. both things can coexist!!! and i love how celine views life and death too. when she talks about feeling like a grandma while jesse feels like a 13 year old boy, like she could disappear at any second, it explains so much about the way she moves through the world. there’s this constant awareness of mortality in her. she romanticizes things because she understands how temporary everything is. and when she says, “I believe if there’s any kind of God it wouldn’t be in any of us, not you or me, but just this little space in between,” THAT HIT ME LIKE A TRUCK ACTUALLY. as a catholic that resonated with me so much because i think sometimes we search for God in grand miracles or institutions or certainty, when maybe holiness also exists in connection and in kindness, in understanding another person so deeply that for a second the distance between souls disappears. that line feels spiritual to me in the purest way possible. and then there’s jesse. oh my gosh jesse. ethan hawke’s range genuinely needs to be studied because the difference between jesse and todd anderson from dead poets society is INSANE. todd feels so timid and internal while jesse feels impulsive and playful and constantly reaching outward. but underneath all the jokes and “rooster prick” energy there’s this deep sadness to him. he keeps circling back to time and regret and failed relationships and growing old beside someone only to realize you stopped truly seeing each other years ago. he talks about imagining  years in the future, wondering about the people you almost loved, the roads you didn’t take, and i think that’s what makes him ask celine to get off the train in the first place. he doesn’t want her to become another hypothetical. another person he almost knew. and i loved his ideas about souls too. like when he talks about his grandmother’s ghost or the idea that souls are just fragments moving through the world trying to reconnect with each other. i don’t even fully understand what he meant but somehow i understand it emotionally. his romanticism feels messy and existential and sincere all at once, and i like that his skepticism balances celine’s openness to things like palm readers and signs and poets. they challenge each other in such a natural way. speaking of the poet scene OH MY GOSH. i love how a random interaction with a street poet somehow ends up reflecting everything about them. “milkshake” should not have emotionally devastated me the way it did but here we are. the movie is full of little moments like that where something seemingly insignificant suddenly becomes unbearably meaningful because of the timing and the intimacy of it all. and the PHONE CALL SCENE??? cutest thing ever actually. the way they pretend to call their friends while secretly confessing what they think about each other absolutely destroyed me. “i like to feel his eyes on me when i look away” LIKE HELLO??? once again circling back to the eye contact thing because this movie understands that sometimes love is just wanting to be perceived by the right person. i think what makes before sunrise so heartbreaking is that it understands how life-changing brief encounters can be. how *does* the love of your life last only one night? how can someone alter your entire worldview after only knowing them for a few hours? every scene together feels so intimate in the truest sense of the word. not intimate physically, but emotionally, spiritually. like they cracked each other open for one night and then had to decide what to do with the pieces. i think before sunrise understands something terrifyingly true about love: sometimes the most important people in your life are the ones you almost lose immediately, sometimes one night can haunt you forever. and i think that’s why this movie feels so intimate and devastating, because it understands that romance isn’t always about permanence. sometimes it’s just about being seen completely by another person, even briefly. sometimes that alone is enough to alter the course of your life forever. anyway i need to go stare out of a train window while thinking about human connection now.

2 stars because at least the corsets were serving. i will not be comparing this to Wuthering Heights because this barely feels like the same story and Emerald Fennell lowkey just wandered into the moors with a dream journal and came back with THIS. first of all the opening was so weird. immediately i felt like i was being held hostage by vibes. and why is mr earnshaw such a man baby??? this grown man was throwing tantrums like a literal toddler every five minutes. also i’m not even gonna get into the casting discourse anymore because that conversation is already a battlefield but why is heathcliff white  isabella randomly yapping about Romeo and Juliet felt exactly like me after watching Romeo + Juliet once and deciding i suddenly understand doomed love. honestly she WAS one of my favorites at first because everyone else was insufferable and she at least felt emotionally interesting but then that weird barking scene happened and i actually recoiled into myself like a dying Victorian child. what the HELL was that. genuinely nightmare behavior. every five minutes this movie introduced a new form of freakery i didn’t know existed. and i know this is an Emerald Fennell movie so i should’ve expected some deeply unsettling nonsense but DAMN. this was rated r-13 in the cinema??? the skin room was disgusting, people were making out at funerals, and heathcliff kissing her dead body at the end made me want to launch myself into the sea. the yearning in this movie was SO aggressive too. not romantic. not heartbreaking. just stressful. heathcliff and cathy don’t even feel tragic to me, they’re just selfish. every choice they make destroys everyone around them and somehow they still act like they’re the victims. edgar and isabella deserved so much better than whatever psychological warfare those two dragged them into. catherine saying marrying heathcliff would degrade her? actually she was wrong. it degraded ISABELLA. also cathy is such a bitch.  why was she so unnecessarily mean to isabella all the time. and heathcliff is literally revolting. nelly though… nelly is SUCH a weird case for me because every ten minutes i switched between “she’s the only sane person here” and “girl why would you do that.” sometimes she was genuinely the only thing holding that entire cursed household together and other times i was staring at the screen like YOU ARE ENABLING THIS??? but honestly when she finally left i respected it because that house felt spiritually diseased. linton was honestly one of the only people in this movie who felt sincere and actually loved cathy without turning it into some weird self-destructive performance art piece. overall this movie felt like gothic horror directed by someone who drank perfume and read too much by candlelight. sometimes visually gorgeous, sometimes genuinely nauseating, and every single character desperately needed both therapy and an exorcism.