English
200 years after the unforgettable Opera by Mozart and De Ponte, the acclaimed movie by Richard Linklater Before Sunrise (1995) reinvented Vienna as city of love. The movie tells about the incidental encounter of two young people on a train in Central Europe: Jesse, an American played by Ethan Hawke whose plane back to the States leaves from Vienna the following day and Céline, a French student who returns to Paris after having visited her grandmother.
They seem to like each other instantly and they begin a conversation that is interrupted abruptly when the train arrives in Vienna where Jesse is supposed to get off. With a genius speech he can convince Céline to get off with him and spend the evening in the city together – he doesn’t have money for a hotel, it’s a beautiful summer afternoon and she can take the next train to Paris in the morning without any major problems.
With every minute that passes the attraction between the two increases – maybe this wouldn’t be the least merit of the movie, making us painfully aware of the passing of time – until it turns into love, a love gets more intense the less time they have, as she will go to Paris the next day and he will return to America.
Without revealing the ending, this movie understand several of the essential elements that constitute the western idea of love, the one from Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont. Our idea of love is essentially based on tragedy. Deep passion is linked to death and the desctruction of the lovers, as seen in the romance from Tristan and Isolde, an authentic myth of our conception of love.
To partly return to the movie and paraphrase a song by Cole Porter Everytime we say goodbye, we die a little, because it is this “death” exactly that preserves, praises and glorifies love until the end. Death and again like in movies the ambiguity of the satisfaction of love, separation of the lovers, being in love once and eternally, an inevitable result of your own passion.
Paul Oilzum
If you rent apartments in Vienna especially during Valentine’s Day, it is much more enjoyable to leave questions of love up to Mozart. Like Oscar Wilde reminded us there is nothing more tragic than pleasure.?
Translated by: salome antigone
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