Like most other men in Christendom, I fell madly in love with Julie Delpy sometime in the early 1990s. I’m not quite sure when I felt the first pull at my heartstrings — perhaps it was when I saw her in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours: White in 1994. But I knew I was utterly lost when, in 1995, I spent one delicious, all too brief night being seduced by her in Vienna in the film Before Sunrise, along with Jesse, Ethan Hawke’s character.
Delpy played Celine, a beautiful, enticing young French woman soon to enrol at the Sorbonne. Hawke’s Jesse was a young American backpacking through Europe after breaking up with his girlfriend. If Sunrise was a little self- consciously hip, a Brief Encounter for Gen-Xers — Celine was reading Georges Bataille, while Jesse had his nose in Klaus Kinski’s autobiography — it felt refreshingly real. Celine and Jesse spent the night wandering through Vienna, talking as only people in their early twenties can about their hopes, dreams and fears for the life ahead of them. They fall in love and part at dawn, having promised each other they will meet up six months later. As we know, they didn ’t.
A whole generation of young hipsters also fell in love with Celine, whom Delpy acknowledged at the time was the character she most closely resembled. She claimed to have written most of her own dialogue. What guy didn’t dream of stumbling upon a Celine/Julie, so milky soft, so fascinating, so French, on a lonely night in Europe? Sometime around then, I actually met Delpy at the Cannes film festival, one not-so-lonely night, at a party on the beach of the Carlton hotel. We were introduced, shook hands or kissed — let’s say kissed — and walked on. A few moments later, there was a commotion behind me. Delpy had fainted; nothing, I suspected, to do with me. When I met her again the other day, however, I thought I’d ask her about it.
“Yes, I used to have — what is it called? — a lack of calcium,” she says, in an English that is only faintly accented. Delpy, who moved to New York in 1990, then to Los Angeles a couple of years later, now divides her time between LA and Paris. We meet in a publicist’s high-rise office on Wilshire Boulevard, in LA, to talk about Before Sunset, the surprising sequel to Before Sunrise. Before Sunset is set nine years later in Paris, where Celine and Jesse run into each other again, without having had any contact in the interim. “I would faint,” she adds, “but I haven’t had it for six or seven years. Now I live in LA and I eat super-healthily. I don’t have dairy products, and it’s changed my whole metabolism.” Chocolate was the source of the problem, it seems.
However, Delpy, who is now 34, still looks like the kind of person — vampire-sucked pale — who might succumb to consumption at any moment. Or hysteria. Or any kind of long-forgotten Victorian illness. She has always been plagued by health problems: she had to wear callipers when she was eight because her feet twisted inward. She says that she used to be a hypochondriac, and would often find herself consumed by migraines and inexplicable panic attacks. She almost never reads, because “I have a visual problem that makes it very hard. It jumps around, everything jumps around all the time, and there’s lights between the letters”.
Today, she has a cold. She rasps horribly when she laughs and has to break off the interview every now and then because she can’t hear anything. Her ears are popping. “I’m so stuffed up,” she says. She jams her fingers in her ears and shakes her head from side to side.
Over the past nine years, neither Hawke nor Delpy has had quite the career that might have been expected of them.
Considering her extraordinary promise and the world-class directors she habitually worked with early on, including Jean-Luc Godard, Leos Carax, Bertrand Tavernier, Carlos Saura, Volker Schlöndorff, Agnieszka Holland and Kieslowski, Delpy has done almost nothing memorable since Before Sunrise — apart, perhaps, from some intriguing guest spots on ER. She is surely hoping that Before Sunset will kick-start her lagging Hollywood career; it was not coincidental that on the day the film was released, she announced in the Hollywood film-trade papers that she had signed with a new agent.
Delpy has been branching out in other directions, however. She has embarked on a singing career and has recently toured Europe. Three of her songs feature in Before Sunset. And she has been writing and directing. She is trying to get her first feature off the ground. It will either be Bathory, about a notorious countess who bathed in the blood of virgins, or Tell Me, which is being produced by Buena Onda Films, a new film-making collective, about a woman who is kidnapped and talks her way out of her predicament with a series of darkly distracting stories. Delpy wrote both. She has already directed a number of shorts.
Whereas these film projects offer clues to Delpy’s char-acter, Celine seems to be who Delpy might be if she were not fascinated by the dark side. “I wanted to represent a woman who can be emotional, sexy, all that, without being a male fantasy,” Delpy says. She is credited, with Hawke and the director, Richard Linklater, as a co-writer of Before Sunset. Linklater has also directed Dazed and Confused, Waking Life and School of Rock.
“Strong, capable of thinking for herself, totally indepen-dent,” adds Delpy. “That’s what I wanted to capture, and I think that’s why women really like the film, because they don’t feel it’s some kind of male representation, fantasy.
“She’s not even a feminist any more,” Delpy continues. “Her mother was a feminist — she’s digested that, she’s beyond that. She feels totally equal to men. I wanted to capture a lot of women of my generation that I feel close to — independent but also emotional, totally in touch with their feelings, but at the same time very strong.”
Which I’m sure sounds great in the abstract, but it makes for a one-dimensional character. Celine, nine years on, is just too good to be true. She’s working as an ecologist, she has all the right political views, she doesn’t like Bush, she’s worried about cultural imperialism, she’s strong, she’s in touch with her feelings, she has all the right ideas about people, society, relationships, she lives in a beautiful apartment, she sings, she plays guitar, she can impersonate Nina Simone dancing. Ugh, enough already.
