There are many things to be said about the Before trilogy, among them the impressive range of its defining qualities: the long tracking shots of extended dialogue in which both Jesse and Céline, played with natural charisma and chemistry by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, take up the threads of a floating and often capricious conversation and weave something that can be magical; the laid-back boldness of its director, Richard Linklater, who’s afraid neither of the intelligent probing of its dialogue nor of the trilogy’s patient playing with its notions of cinematic time; the reliable nine-year gaps between each of the installments, making the series as much for the audience…
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In the cinematic hub of Austin, Texas, home to a reputable university, shortly after the turn-of-the-century and the disaster of September 11th, Waking Life plays out its enthralling rotoscope dreamland with what seems like a disordered, chaotic flurry of dialogues. It is all very unremitting—loquacious, academic fuzziness, street-talk and bone-dry theory rattled off as though it were the effluvia of something in the air, a vapor or an intoxicant, a poison maybe. While most narrative films, including those that are experimental, avant-garde, tend to exploit film as a visual medium, using dialogue as a supplement to the bread-and-butter of the cinema—the moving image—Waking Life emphasizes dialogue, which is so densely…
