A Hemingway Christmas

If you've never seen it before, a classic holiday piece from The New Yorker.

Sunrise/Sunset

I hate to feel completely captured by a film. Not to feel completely caught up in the story, but to feel like the lives and the ideas on screen are my life, or the parts that matter, anyway. Damn it all, I want to be an original character.

But damned if there aren't, apparently, tons of people out there living my life, and damned if Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy don't capture that life in all its bittersweet normality.

Nine years ago, Hawke and Delpy met in the film Before Sunrise, where the two cross paths on a train bound for Vienna and spend the evening walking the picturesque streets of that burg, baring their souls, sharing their hopes and dreams and thoughts, and ultimately parting, planning to meet again in six months. Nine years later the two meet again, this time in Paris, having failed to rendezvous as planned, and they walk and talk again, filling in the blanks of their lives, and wondering how things might have been.

The movies are simple, just shots of the two sitting, walking, talking, occasionally sharing a more intimate moment, and the conversation is spot-on, natural, with all the awkward rejoinders and jokes that people make when they talk for the first time. It's easy enough, then, to feel that these people might be you, or someone you know.

But it's the way the conversation changes from the first film to the second that hits you in the gut, and makes you wonder how they know you so well, and what the hell that means for your life. Nine years ago the conversation was so damn young, with grand pronouncements about the world and life and relationships, and what might be and what should be. Conversations I had in places I had them, young and wide-eyed, staying up all night to predict the future over pinball in a Viennese bar. Nine-years later, there's an uncomfortable discussion of politics and depressed rehashing of the failures of their personal lives. The thing these films know is that there's a point where the conversation of one's life shifts, from what should be to what what can be. The change happens slowly, and we know something is changing, but it's not clear what, until it's spelled out for us in all its cinematic sadness. And then we realize that, not only has this change taken place, but it's not unique, either. It's another loss that comes with age, the notion that you will be a shining light in the world, the first, the best, the most original, the embodiment of the life everyone always knew they wanted.

So, I don't know what else to add. Those damn movies have left me feeling superfluous. It's good cinema. Check them out.