Twenty years ago this week, Richard Linklater first introduced us to Jesse and Celine in Before Sunrise, kickstarting a trilogy of films — also including Before Sunset and Before Midnight — that offered one of cinema’s most authentic portrayals of love: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Dominick Mayer (DM): For a movie as navel-gazing and utterly ’90s in certain respects as Before Sunrise is, it’s the fount from which one of Linklater’s foremost accomplishments sprung. And it’s a perfect follow-up to his previous film to boot. Where Dazed and Confused perfectly captures the listlessness of high school summers, all intoxication and wandering conversation and just wandering in general, Before Sunrise continues that thought but adds to it the pangs of onset adulthood. Before Sunrise perhaps works best when viewed through that lens, because even as someone who adores it, I’ll be the first to admit that it’s the easiest of the three films to side-eye just a little.
After all, it’s really, really enamored with what college kids have to say about life. But, as the Before films go on to insist with increasing fervor, the conversations don’t necessarily matter as much as the way they’re delivered and the subtle cues between Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Celine. For them, wandering the streets and canals of Vienna is just something to do while in transit to elsewhere, and they’re killing time with an attractive stranger as best they can in the interim. They’re clearly compatible but in that way that you are specifically in the earlier days of college, when meeting people and wandering through social modes is an integral part of your day-to-day life, when you’re enamored with just getting to know somebody that isn’t like anybody you’ve met before. In those scenarios, whether the other person even makes for particularly great company is beside the point.
Now, I know you two may well end up preferring the grounded realism of later installments to the dreamy, European whimsy of the first, but Sunrise is a great, great film concerned with watching people fall in love, from the first meet cute onward. It’s measured and observed in a way films like this in its own time, and even now, really aren’t.
Blake Goble (BG): It’s just downright silly to try and pick a favorite time to watch Delpy and Hawke before certain times of day. It’s always a good time to watch this couple evolve, grow in and out of love, and behave like real people.
And yet I have a favorite.
I love Before Sunrise’s emotional maturity and sweetness, and I admire Before Midnight’s total commitment and bravery in showing marriage as a sometimes imperfect situation. But Before Sunset’s simplicity, expedient storytelling, and just all around cool confidence and honesty in the face of love is the most affecting and impressive chapter. It has the hardest job of all three by being an extended continuation, and it doesn’t try to put an official stamp on this couple so much as let them breathe and show their development as people. Only then does Sunset suggest that this couple is going to truly wind up with each other. It openly admits that the prior 1995 chapter was not a perfect and happy ending, but now’s the time for reconciliation, closure, long-lost resentments to come into the fold. Only then can true – if not flawed but inevitable – love emerge. It’s amazing, not just in concept, but in how honest this film allows its leads to be. They say things, brutally openly emotional things that you would never ever hear in a summer romance movie. (Nicholas Sparks adaptations have all but ruined love in the movies.) And Hawke and Delpy come into themselves as people of genuine emotion and interest. Add all that to the fact that Before Sunset has the unceremonious position as the middle film, and in that regard, it’s the strongest and most rewarding of Linklater’s three films. Jeez, it’s so confident and relaxed and natural that there’s an 11-minute take, and the trio shot it in 15 days.
If we’re to measure the success of these three films by how effectively Linklater depicts his Jesse and Celine, how invested we become in them, Sunset is so stripped of extraneous plot, and so focused on the duo, that we feel like we almost know them intimately. If all you need to tell a story is two people and a place to talk, then, well, Before Sunset is an authoritative work. Way more accomplished and in-depth than Before Sunrise.
Although, that argument could be thrown out the window by the unflinching and even painful privacy we’re exposed to in Before Midnight.
Justin Gerber (JG): Choosing the best Before film is nearly impossible, and truthfully my answer changes on a conversation-by-conversation basis. But as I write this response a little after midnight, my answer is the entry that takes place just before midnight. Do you guys get it? My answer is Before Midnight!
Blake, to piggyback off your last comment, in our 2013 outing with Jesse and Celine, we bear witness to the reality that no one has a perfect ending. All of those couples we see in romantic movies, holding hands as they walk down the street before the credits roll? They’re going to fight eventually. They’re going to exchange unpleasantries. Some of them are going to make it, and some of them are not. Before Midnight could have presented another 90 minutes of Jesse and Celine experiencing a carefree evening out as a married couple, and you know what? It probably would have worked. I trust Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy completely at this point. But in ’95, didn’t we have to wait nine years to see if they would end up meeting up when they said they would? Weren’t we forced to wait another nine years to see if Jesse was going to make that plane in Sunset? With that knowledge, why would we have ever thought Linklater and his cohorts would make it so easy for us with Midnight?
Jesse and Celine have two daughters now, and their love for them is never in doubt. Here’s the thing though: despite that awful fight that takes place in the hotel room during Midnight’s climax, I don’t doubt that Jesse and Celine still love each other. We’ve just caught them at a really bad time this go ‘round, and I’m fine with that. As a viewer, I appreciate getting a look at something I would otherwise steer clear of in my real life. It’s part of the escape, whether it’s romantic or hard to look it. Blake, the question I have for you is this: Is “love” enough for one of the greatest on-screen couples
