Two students travelling alone, Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy), meet on a train from Budapest to Vienna. They are immediately attracted and Jesse persuades Celine, who is supposed to be going straight on to Paris, to get off the train with him and spend the night in Vienna before he boards a plane back to America. They can’t afford a room so they stroll around the city, staying awake with each other, sketching in back-story, confessing hopes, dreams and their love for each other. They part at a station the next morning, promising that they’ll meet at the same place in six months time. According to Linklater, who based the story on his own one-off meeting with an unforgettable woman in Philadelphia in the ’80s, the whole film was shot and played as if the pair would definitely keep their promise. But the equally wonderful sequel, Before Sunset, set nine years later, reveals that one of them did not. And . . . that’s that. Except that it, really, really isn’t.
Because Jesse and Celine are rich and real and true. They complain about having nice parents who wanted the best for them. They claim superior knowledge which they can’t back up, as self-regarding kids with a wee bit of book learning are wont to do. They say ludicrous things about even death being ambiguous, because they are too young to accept their own mortality. They say trite things about war and reincarnation and media mind control that make you laugh because you’ve heard yourself saying them and recall that, bizarrely, you’ve also used this specious crap as a seduction tool, and that it worked. Perhaps that’s really what falling in love is: finding someone who will find our narrative endlessly fascinating, and be the one person who won’t constantly take issue or switch off and watch paint dry instead. Thanks Linsay. Before Sunrise makes me understand the sacrifices you make every day.
The couple encounter equally pretentious people: Viennese alternative types putting on a surrealist play; homeless men who write poetry in exchange for money. The day gradually becomes a night that gradually becomes a dream about the possibility of a utopian ideal . . . where one doesn’t work or care about earning money or domestic mundanities, but spends one’s time wandering through faraway places, connecting with strangers and falling in a kind of love that is about something more transcendent than sex, and is especially fulfilling and intense because it is temporary. The pair reveal more about themselves because time is pressing and they need to confess, to imprint themselves upon each other’s lives, to express the inexpressible, to grasp the moment and abolish tomorrow.
The fact that this is a specifically student kind of dream love is punched home by the record shop scene. This store is a vinyl paradise; the kind of place where discs hang from the ceiling in round black tribute to Pretty In Pink (see here) and you flick through a rack and clock mint condition copies of records by Frank Zappa and The Searchers and Ella Fitzgerald and The Kinks and Gordon Lightfoot . . . although someone really should have a word about their display system because the records don’t seem to be sorted into genre or arranged alphabetically, so obviously this scene makes me hyperventilate a little. But this store makes up for it by having a proper listening booth where you can put the needle on the record yourself. Celine has picked out a tamponic folk record by Kath Bloom, and Delpy and Hawke perform a beautiful dance while standing stock still in front of a static camera in a tiny room. Slight embarrassment and amusement when the record turns out to be so folky and earnest, then slow realisation that the romantic lyrics and pure voice do pretty much sum up how they both feel. The couple stop smiling, but are still too vulnerable to each other and too shell-shocked by this whole experience to entirely connect. So they look at each other, but only, with endlessly perfect timing, when the other is looking away. At one point Hawke begins to tentatively do the leaning-in-for-a-kiss thing . . . but, nope, all glory is fleeting. And the way Delpy looks at him – which he never sees, but we do – is with the kind of awe and adoration that every man wants from a woman as naturally beautiful as Delpy. The pair move, in the space of a few seconds, from two slightly annoying people thinking about shagging to two angels in whom the viewer’s belief in a perfect, eternal, transcendent love is entirely invested. This is virtuoso stuff.
One of the movie’s great triumphs is Vienna as a supporting character. Done badly and this film looks like a banal travelogue. But the couple journey through both its most grand buildings and most dilapidated and faded streets, and Vienna comes alive and seems to watch over them, sometimes distantly curious, sometimes richly amused, occasionally darkly threatening.
The ending is, like the rest of the movie, understated and beautifully true. The pair part, as they have to, and make their somewhat ludicrous six-month pact. There is no swelling music nor scenery chewing because Linklater still respects us in the morning. We cut to the places they’ve been in Vienna, bathed in a sad morning glow, and feel the presence of the memory of thousands of stories like this one in places that remain alive long after we die, yet, maybe, carry some imprint of our presence. We cut back to their respective trains, and two tired, lonely people, at first wistful, and then smiling, gently, at some memory of their night.
Just to undercut the romance with some reality here: the basic premise of Before Sunrise probably wouldn’t work if made now. I mean . . . the pair would be Facebook friends, and then chat thanks to Skype and a webcam, and then get bored after a month or so because long-distance relationships are just too frustrating, and some youth-cool-hunting hack director would make him wank to internet porn and her text him a sex message meant for someone else by mistake and God I’m getting depressed even thinking about what passes for romance in these increasingly cynical times, as well as what we’re inevitably losing by allowing technology to make every gratification immediate.
I’m just glad that Linklater had the idea and filmed it before Sleepless In Seattle became You’ve Got Mail. Because Before Sunrise is one of the great cinematic love stories, driven by a unique absence of sentimentality and written to celebrate its viewers rather than its stars. Julie Delpy is every boy’s perfect girlfriend and Ethan Hawke is a revelation, and it’s their absolute integrity, commitment and absence of vanity that ultimately makes this both a teen movie and a love story unlike any other.
KIDS
1995
Starring: Leo Fitzpatrick, Chloë Sevigny, Justin Pierce, Rosario Dawson
Dir.: Larry Clark
Plot: At last, after 40 years, every parent’s worst nightmare: the children who won’t learn a valuable lesson.
Key line: ‘You hear disease this, disease that. Fuckin’ everyone’s dying an’ shit. That shit is made up, Man! I don’t know no kid who’s dying of AIDS!’
The most controversial teen movie of the 1990s begins with a one-minute snog. Nothing that shocking about that, except that the snoggers look like children, and are eating each others faces like teens really do, all open-mouth and tongue and no attempt to be subtle. It really does point out that one minute of screen-time can feel like an hour.
Before you’ve got used to sitting uncomfortably, the ugly boy has talked the pretty girl into fucking. You realise that this girl may not even be a teen yet. The overhead shot of the boy’s pale, skinny back and the girls’ face points out how difficult it really is to tell the difference between ecstatic pleasure and agonising pain on a girl’s face during sex. A voiceover provides some distraction from the image: ‘Virgins – I love ’em. No diseases. No loose-as-a-goose pussy. No skank. No nuthin’. Just pure pleasure.’ The punk rock of The Folk Implosion’s ‘Daddy Never Understood’ sends a shot of pure adrenalin into your brain. None of this is right. But it’s certainly something you know you have to put yourself through.
Director Larry Clark and writer Harmony Korine’s notorious docu-drama about the sex, drugs and violence habits of a group of alienated New York teens has not lost its power to shock over the last sixteen years. The film revolves around a quest. Jenny (Sevigny) learns that she is HIV-positive. She insists that her only sexual partner has been Telly (Fitzpatrick), a promiscuous scumbag who is obsessed with deflow
ering under-age virgins. As Jenny searches for Telly to tell him the terrible news, we watch the amoral New York kids they hang with talk wigger ebonics, take drugs, have under-age sex, steal, racially abuse, rape, beat a man senseless and expose each other and everyone to the risk of infection. If you’re expecting another crack here about this not being a Disney film, the joke’s too near-the-knuckle. The film was funded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein of Miramax fame. Miramax is part-owned by the Walt Disney corporation. Once the paymasters had freaked out at the film’s explicit content, the Weinsteins were forced to buy out Disney in order to get the film released. Good move. The pair made millions, largely from the controversy surrounding a film that appeared to encourage very young actors to have sex with each other onscreen. They didn’t, incidentally. But the film was so well shot, written and acted that people almost believed that the film-makers just paid a bunch of kids to behave badly and pointed the camera at them.
There’s a keen understanding of gender difference here, defined in early cutting between separate groups of boys and girls discussing sex. Both environments are living-rooms in shared houses. Both discussions are explicit and performed with such naturalism by an extraordinary young cast that they feel entirely improvised, which they weren’t. But there, the similarities end. The girls’ discussion is funny, light-hearted, optimistic. Although all complain about the pain and blood of losing their virginity, they appear eager to own their own stories, and entirely unwilling to compete with each other.
But the boys’ discussion is brutal and contemptuous of women, and obsessed with the idea that emotions within sex are for the weak. While the girls seem informed and eager to share real experiences, the boys just want to impress each other with tales of numbers fucked and dumbass generalisations about what ‘bitches’ want. Everything the boys do in Kids is informed by the misogynist, homophobic and violent end of the multi-faceted artform that is rap music, implying that hip hop gave young American men of all races and backgrounds an excuse to indulge their worst instincts and wear them as a badge of honour. Speaking as a hip hop fan, this is just one of the uncomfortable assertions made by Kids, the kind of harsh truth that we anti-censorship liberals prefer to avoid.
The girls use exactly the same post-hip hop linguistic flow and parlance as the boys. But the boys use second-hand cool-speak as a weapon, largely wielded against women. Korine and Clark never halt things in order to make this point clear. You judge for yourself, and I’m sure every individual viewer might have an entirely different take on these exchanges.
But the discussions gradually move on to the film’s major preoccupation. I mean, even the title of this movie is fiendishly clever: change the first letter and you have the thing that truly scares Korine and Clark. By the mid ’90s, AIDS was no longer front-page news and a new generation of kids were entering the sexual arena believing that HIV was something their parents invented to stop them having fun. Kids is about those kids, and the potential they carry as serial killers by default.
In that sense, the teen movie it reaches out to most directly is Gregg Araki’s haunting vérité study of gay promiscuity, Totally Fucked Up (see here). Kids is the heterosexual, sensationalist version of Araki’s vision of a lost tribe of inner-city children, too young to fully grasp the consequences of their cynicism and nihilism but too old to allow themselves to accept that they are children, utterly disconnected from parents, family and the parts of society that offer potential for a more civilised and civil way of life. Call it Generation X or Y or Z or whatever. These movies are indictments of an adult world which refuses to engage with children as soon as they refuse to do as they are told and obediently follow the school–college–work–breed–die life journey society maps out for all of us. As a middle ground between conformity and exclusion doesn’t exist, the centre plainly cannot hold.
The film ends with a slow, quiet, reflective sadness at odds with the frantic action. The wild party – at which a drugged Jenny has finally found Telly, fucking a 13-year-old girl, potentially killing her – is over. Telly’s equally amoral friend Casper (Pierce) rapes her while she sleeps. We see shots of the human debris around Washington Square Park, and watch junkies stagger and nod towards oblivion. We see Telly in bed with his conquest, and hear his voiceover justifying his actions, insisting that, ‘Sometimes when you’re young, the only place to go is inside’, and that, if we take sex away from him, he ‘really got nuthin’. We’ve heard much punk rock from Lou Barlow’s Sebadoh and The Folk Implosion bands, but now we’re listening to a gentler, sadder side of Barlow’s art. Suddenly, we’re looking at Casper looking at us. He looks surprised. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he asks us. ‘What happened?’ The credits roll.
What’s to become of these kids, of this generation? Casper is asking the only question on your mind. And if there wasn’t enough darkness here, there’s a cruel punch-line. Despite Kids having taken him from Washington Square Park skateboard bum to successful actor overnight, Justin Pierce hanged himself in a Las Vegas hotel room just five years later. He was 25.
Other members of this extraordinary cast fared better. Chloë Sevigny has become a renowned actress and model, gaining an Oscar nomination for her work in 1999’s Boys Don’t Cry. Leo Fitzpatrick is probably best known for playing doomed junkie Johnny Weeks in the The Wire TV show. I hope the guy gets some more parts as, I dunno, a computer programmer or a puppy whisperer before he’s finished, because all that self-inflicted degradation can’t be good for the soul.
The cast of Kids are definitely some of the reasons why it remains a much better film than anything in the teen bleaksploitation genre it spawned, including many of Clark (see Bully, p. 409) and Korine’s later works. Others include veteran photographer Clark’s brilliant camera-work, which successfully lends documentary-style shooting a compositional skill and artistry that is simply beyond most directors, and Korine’s characters, who may be largely appalling, but still possess dimensions, vitality and authenticity.
But really, the reason why Kids is here is because it is unique. All 99 other films in this book make me relate to the teenage protagonists. They reinforce my own preferred self-image of a teenager at heart and remind of me of things I used to be, and make me feel pretty good about lessons learned. Kids doesn’t. Kids reminds me that I’m a parent of a 24-year-old man who got through his teenage years intact and, although he did plenty of terrible things which he’ll never share with me, and rightly so, has turned out to be a decent, civilised, kind-hearted adult. Kids shows me that it could have been very different, and as I find myself horrified by its characters’ actions, I feel hugely grateful that my son wasn’t that boy.
Despite all the bare young flesh and shocking imagery, I’ve never felt that Kids was lying or exploiting children for exploitation’s sake. It feels true, not just about the mid 1990s, but about the here and the now. If Clark and Korine have conned me, fair enough. A con this perfectly executed is a lesson in itself.
CLUELESS
1995
Starring: Alicia Silverstone, Brittany Murphy, Paul Rudd, Stacey Dash, Dan Hedaya, Breckin Meyer
Dir.: Amy Heckerling
Plot: Jane Austen is a Valley Girl.
Key line(s): Cher: ‘I’m captain of the Pismo Beach Disaster Relief.’
Daddy: ‘I don’t think they need your skis.’
Cher: ‘Daddy! Some people lost all their belongings! Don’t you think that includes athletic equipment?’
Cher Horowitz (Silverstone) is selfish, shallow, manipulative, elitist, spoiled . . . and entirely adorable. The Mean Girl memo must have got lost in the Beverly Hills post. She lives in a giant white mansion with her irascible but wildly successful lawyer dad (Hedaya), but, tragically, her mom died in a freak liposuction accident. Her best friend is an equally superficial yet adorable black girl called Dionne (Dash) and together they go to the mall, interfere in people’s lives, speak in an obscure, sparky, mutant patois called Valley Speak or Valspeak, manipulate the entire school, go to the mall, co
mpare fashion extravagances, go to the mall, enjoy their wealth and popularity, and go to the mall. Cher’s life is exactly like a book by Jane Austen called Emma which she probably hasn’t read because her favourite book is Cliffs Notes.
Out of this potentially aggravating concept Amy Heckerling, as both writer and director, shapes one of the greatest joys in the teen movie canon. A movie so effortlessly funny, inventive, good-natured and brilliantly performed that almost every non-dark piece of future teen film or TV, from Buffy The Vampire Slayer to Glee, was made in its image. Feisty but flawed heroines, wealthy kids in fast cars, punky pop soundtrack, California sun and smartarse dialogue woven from a cross between a knowingly superficial slang that developed among kids in the San Fernando Valley in the early ’70s, slacker-surfer dudespeak, and a small-but-crucial shot of rap-derived ebonics. The relentless ingenuity of the language took an obvious cue from Heathers (see here) but binned the nihilism, and Clueless, along with the Wayne’s World and Bill And Ted movies, charmed the world until we all became, like, totally.
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