One summer night in 1995, I went, with my friend Tim, to see a great little film called Before Sunrise, which starred the French actress Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke.
It is the story of an American boy and a French girl and the fourteen hours they spend together in Vienna "Before Sunrise", when they must part company and go back to their own separate lives. It's a really gentle film which is entirely based in dialogue and characterisation. They discuss themselves, life and philosophical ideas in such an organic way that you can just imagine that this is something real that could actually happen to you - not some schmaltzy Hollywood crap.
So anyway - at the end of the movie they say goodbye but rather than staying in touch and ruining the magic that they have created, they make a pact to meet in six months to the day on the same train platform at the same time. And that is where the story ends.
So for the last nine years I have been wondering what happened to them. Did they meet again? Did only one of them turn up? I'm soon to find out because the sequel (Before Sunset) is out next Friday!!! Yippee!
I read an article with Julie Delpy, where she said that herself, Hawke and the director of the sequel and the original, Richard Linklater, were compelled to write the follow up because they felt that a piece of them was missing without that ultimate resolution - did they meet again? There was also a quote from Ethan Hawke which really resonated with me...
"Our life doesn't work in such a clean narrative as most movies do. This makes us think that our lives are boring because our lives and even our relationships don't have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's never as clear as all that. It's so much more amorphous. What we're aspiring to do is capture what it's really like to be alive, to take naturalism to a new, heightened degree."
I guess the reason that this quote got to me, was because it grapples with the idea that we are something so much more than the sum of our parts. What a great idea that we have no beginning, middle and end! That means that life is full of endless possibilities and that anything might happen. It sounds like a cliche, but cliches are cliches because out of all the things that have been said they are the things that have held true.
I've just been talking to my friend Bill about how, after my relationship with Will, that I want to take myself off the shelf for a while. But isn't it in the moments when you're not looking, that life gently taps you on the shoulder and reminds you what it's all about, again? You might think that at 31 years of age this is something that should be plainly obvious to me, but it's easy to lose sight of the real things.
I am going to go out tonight, and I am going to go out without agenda. I am neither available nor unavailable. If I go home alone I am not a failure. If I meet someone cute, I don't have to sleep with them. I can just give them my number.
Because at the end of the day I could just have some fun with my friends and that could be enough. That's about as real as it gets!