Before Sunrise/set

These are silly films. While I was watching them in order to write this blog, I was scared that my roommate would walk in and relentlessly make fun of me for reveling in the idealistic situations the films set up for us continually, with the pretense of realism. But, there is something appealing in both Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, in radically different ways. The first film plays on a young sense of idealism and romanticism, while the second film attempts to combat cynicism that an older generation of film viewers will be familiar with.
Before Sunrise (1995) starts out with The Dido and Aeneas Overture playing as part of the nondiegetic score. The rest of the soundtrack is along the similar lines with the use of Vivaldi, Beethoven, Straus, and Bach. The music of the film is attempting to connect to a sense of classical timelessness. This kind of love story has repeated itself throughout history (further back, even, than the Dido and Aeneas epic) and has stability in our culture. The film is extremely idealistic, chronicling the perfect pairing of two complete strangers on a one-night-stand in Vienna. The use of a kind of music that has stood the test of time is tapping into our preconceived notions of the story itself - a story of boy-meets-girl that has always and will always be appealing to us. The use of the Dido and Aeneas song complicates that theme by introducing a hint of tragedy that might mirror the broken union between those two classic figures.
The familiarity of these composers is also notable. While Bach, Vivaldi, and Beethoven are very familiar to us, the songs that were picked for the score are fairly unfamiliar. For example, instead of using a piece of music from his Four Seasons, the film uses "Concerto In B Flat Major For Violin And Oboe With Ripieno Strings, RV 358," which will not be as familiar to a popular film audience. I think this parallels what the film is trying to do stylistically. They are using themes and storylines that are very familiar, but attempting to introduce us to a new way of telling that story.
The second film takes a different approach. There is one tiny bit of a classical song that is hardly noticeable as diegetic music. In opposition to the first film, the filmmakers aren’t trying to connect the story to anything classical or romantic. Instead they are more concerned with portraying a sense of realism. They use mostly source music and when it’s not source, it’s composed and performed by Julie Delphy and – we assume – the Celine character. By pulling us out of this idea of classicism that we formed in our connections with the first movie, Before Sunset is reminding us of real life. In Before Sunrise, we are somewhat ignorant of the two characters’ outside lives. They come into the philosophical discussions that they have, but Vienna remains a secluded world where outside problems do not seem real. In Before Sunset, the two characters have attachments (wives, kids, boyfriends) that are key elements of the storyline. How Jesse feels about his relationship with his wife is very important to his character and how we will eventually view his decision to stay with Celine.
The conversations the two characters have are also much more realistic. Instead of the idealism that the first film employs, the second is far more cynical and derivative of lives full of disappointment and mediocrity. It is even filmed in real time, again to make a claim of realism. The Nina Simone song at the end of the film is not an attempt to make the scene more romantic, but to point to the eccentricities of Celine that Jesse finds so appealing, tying us into the conversation the two had earlier (in both films) about those imperfections. These eccentricities don’t exist in the straightforward classical music that plays throughout Before Sunrise, but are key to the Julie Delphy music and source music in Before Sunset. Nina Simone, as Celine points out, is anything but straightforward. She takes long pauses and goes on tangents, something that a composer like Mozart or Bach would never do in their use of closed form.
Before Sunset points out that even though we would like love to be as straightforward and uncomplicated as a piece of classical music (as the music in the Aeneas Overture), it is more like a Nina Simone song, unpredictable and diverted and convoluted.