Seeing The Love Light in Her Eyes

They say that C. S. Lewis first saw God when travelling up Headington Hill. Later he certainly met in Oxford one of his acolytes nearby, an American called Joy Davidman, whom he had helped see the (Christian) light in another case of distance learning. She made her own journey to meet him in his Risinghurst lair. She was a fan of his Christian works - though less so of the novels, yet The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is an impressively religious tome, well brought out in the film, right down to the symbolism of the resurrected lion (voiced by Liam Neeson)

Travel up Lewis’s Hill today, as nearly all Oxford Tube travellers must do, and you are more likely to see a series of seemingly interminable road works and, if journeying at night time, the Disneyland-type illuminations on the trees of Oxford Brookes University which is so concerned with bringing light into people’s lives it is now planning its own 24 hour- lluminated giant tower block to complement its fairy lights as well as its own rather ominous LECD blue light square.

This new blue light district is alienating rather than romantic. Better romance in this post-Valentine season can be found in a choice of two independent films that have substance and flair - and a journey around two other European cities.

Our selected modern classics are a pair of indie films by Richard Linklater, Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). The first has an American student Jess (Ethan Hawkes) and a French student Celine (Julie Delpy) meeting in a train, deciding to walk around Vienna together in a day, talking a lot (mostly good stuff, not too pretentious) and falling in love. The moment when she looks at him in a record store is where the movie’s chief sexual frisson occurs. Their trains are due to leave at sunrise the next morning, soon after they have made love in a handily lush park.

The second has them meeting nine years later in Paris. The planned reunion six months later in Vienna never worked out and they have other partners now but neither of the new relationships is really working. They meet again at the French bookshop that helped to publish James Joyce in the past; Jess (Ethan) has just published a novel which has trawled over their past affair and she turns up at a book reading event.

We see that they have not had the chance to fall out of love with each other. At one moment she swears at him in a taxi and then reaches out to touch him but draws back. He does not notice the attempt at contact. Another missed chance?

Perhaps not. He ends up in her flat. She talks about seeing Nina Simone in concert and re-enacts the experience. Will anything else be re-enacted? What of the plane he has to catch? The ending is brilliantly open-ended. My fellow Oxonians in the cinema five years ago chuckled with pleasure at its appropriateness.

It is important to see these sparkling, largely-improvised but still controlled films in the right order: experience the dawning of youthful love first then the pain of maturity next. And prepare to wait for the third in the series. Four years from now and what are the odds on Before Teatime?

- Ken Lovesey