The Before Trilogy (1995/2004/2013)

directed by Richard Linklater

Nicole Horowitz

I first saw Before Sunrise on an airplane, headed to Spain. A few months before, I had met and fallen in love with a man in the city of Los Angeles. And yet it seemed things were not to be, for us, long term. He was in school, set to spend the summer in San Francisco and the fall back on the east coast. In other words, he had solid, tangible plans that didn’t involve me. At the time, I was drifting through life with a lack of enthusiasm, and had recently decided to move abroad for a year.

Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy is comprised of three films, each released nine years after the last. The principle two actors, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, and director Linklater himself, power all three films, allowing us an organic view into both the aging process and the evolution of a story told in three parts. In scope, the trio of films pitch a look at the way relationships develop, year over year, circumstance over circumstance.

The first film, Before Sunrise, is built on a simple premise: Hawke and Delpy’s characters, Jesse and Céline, meet on a mysterious train rolling through Vienna. As strangers buying into a whim, they decide to get out and explore the city, spending the night strolling Vienna’s ancient streets, interacting with locals, and drinking wine in the park. All the while, the film’s cinematic gaze beckons us closer and closer to the duo, as they flirt with the idea of proximity to each other. They part at sunrise the next day as both lovers and friends, haphazardly promising to meet again in the same spot, a year in the future.

Because of my own life’s journey, the film, pitched as a kind of romantic fantasy, felt more like a fictionalization. “That dialogue feels a little on the nose,” I thought, watching Jesse and Céline sit at the back of a city bus, asking each other deliriously personal questions—an interaction not unlike one I had with my new partner on our second or third date. I felt like the film threw a sidelong glance into the type of life that I myself was living: something full of uncertainty, and yet all the more exhilarating, even aspirational, for it.

The idea of Before Sunrise as fantasy is not unfamiliar to anyone who has traveled: the notion that the café where you sit alone is in fact a train depot, ready to transport you to a place of connectivity in a world you’ve recently discovered to be wider and stranger than you had previously suspected. The fantasy is also not foreign to anyone who has been deeply, frighteningly in love—the feeling of a sort of secret world created by two people and populated by them alone. In watching the film, the cinematic gaze can feel particularly voyeuristic, like an intrusion on a world made up uniquely of two people. I almost forgot, multiple times, that in the medium of film, world building is always done for the viewer. It’s for us, the people with the popcorn or single serving airline meals, to find ourselves in the story.

Watching the couple go from friends to lovers on a picnic blanket in a park in Vienna, I wasn’t filled with a sense of satisfaction, but sadness. I, about to live on a different continent than the man I was in love with, had become obsessively interested in the strains that accompany distance, and felt that it would not only be improbable but vaguely impossible for Jesse and Céline to make their relationship work, long-term. I steeled myself for what I thought would be an unrealistically cheesy film ending: the timeline flashing forward a year, the young couple meeting at the train station, Jesse sweeping Céline into his arms in a dramatic kiss as the music swells. Or maybe the film would take the opposite approach: ruthlessly puncturing any notion of happy endings, with one of them alone at the train station, waiting for a partner who never arrives. Or saddest of all, an empty frame.

But we get none of the above. The film ends with a lingering shot of Céline in the soft light of dawn, alight, beautiful, perhaps as she will always be remembered in Jesse’s mind. We don’t get to know the ending. These two characters live in a Schrodinger’s box of will-theys-or-won’t-theys, the truth kept close to the vest, only between those two. No option picked, no button pressed. Frozen. To me, there on the plane, full of uncertainty, it felt like the most romantic notion of all.

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But then, eventually, we do get to know what happens. Audiences waited nine years, between 1995 and 2004, for a follow-up film, Before Sunset. And on my own delayed timeline I, too, waited years between watching Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. This second film came to me from the television screen of my apartment, back in Los Angeles, six years after my move abroad, and years after I had broken up with the man I had met so mysteriously, so magically, so long ago.

In Before Sunset, we learn that Jesse and Céline did not reunite tearfully at the train station, but not quite because they gave up on the notion of far-fetched romantic love. In fact, Jesse did show up, but Céline was delayed by the death of her grandmother the week before. With no exchanged phone numbers or contact information, Jesse was left strolling the empty train station, calling out to his lost love. Or at least, this is the image we conjure up in our minds. In reality, this scene is never given to us, preserving at least some aspect of the fantasy of the train reunion.

Instead, in Before Sunset, these characters live in a more realistic version of their own present. Jesse is unhappily married. Céline has settled into a lackluster relationship of her own. This reunion of the two characters is brought on, in fact, by a sort of meta-interaction: Jesse has written a fictionalized account about his encounter with a mysterious Parisian in Vienna, and is in Paris on tour for the book, which has garnered some international acclaim.

This plot interlude acts as a break in the fourth wall—an acknowledgement that the two realistically never would have met again, never would have found out what happened at the train station, if it weren’t for the power of the narrative that they have built in their own heads, literalized through Jesse’s writing of the book. In this way it is a continuation of the fantasy of the first film, and the improbability of this second life to their interaction is acknowledged early on as being manifested by the strength of the fantasy of their initial interaction.

But Before Sunset’s takeaways are not always literal, and have as much to do with the time the characters spent apart as together. If twenty-one is a time when you want to believe in soul mates and chance encounters—in a tailor-made destiny awaiting you out there in a world where you’re willing to try and do and be the most ferocious version of yourself—then thirty is a time when you can’t help but hope, even when there is no practicality to those hopes, that whatever aspects of your past seemed most mythical might hold the key to ending your present unease. Perhaps even to creating a future sense of well-being. Maybe an old love, friendship, or lost idol will appear out of the blue to appease the newly discovered restlessness of the soul.

For me, someone who had taken significant chances in an earlier phase of life, only to have them illegible in a newer, more stable place, it immediately became difficult not to read this as a sort of signpost for the present. Maybe, despite the ordinary circumstances I currently find myself in, something from those gregarious days of my youth might have stuck, or might be sticking its thumb out somewhere in the wide world, waiting for me to pick it back up again.

This is the fantasy on which Before Sunset is built. The characters themselves can’t fully inhabit a “real” world, a world outside of each other, because they know another possible world exists. Jesse admits later in the film that he hoped that somehow Céline would catch wind of his reading in Paris, and somehow, just maybe, show up, as she does, to close the loop of their story.

But we also realize that he doesn’t, in fact, want the loop to close. Instead, this film, attempting to fake or mirror the conceit of being shot in one continuous take, tries to run out the clock on Jesse’s regular life, his dissatisfactions, and in its place give us back the fantasy of being twenty-one and finding your soulmate on the train. Or it offers an even more outrageous fantasy: of a triumphant return to your own fantasy, to the person you once were before life got in the way, to reclaim something long written off as frivolous.

Watching the film, I started to wonder, “Could Jesse really stay in Paris? Push the eject button on the life that he has spent a whole nine years building?” By the end of the film, as Céline shakes her hips to Nina Simone and makes Jesse laugh and we see the undeniable chemistry travel like a shiver through their spines, we know he will.

The last line in the film “You’re going to miss your flight, baby” acts as a type of orgasmic conclusion, positing that yes, we can escape the parameters of reality that adult existence has built for us. We can escape into the world of our past fantasies, dredge them out into the open, into the present, into a tentative once-in-a-decade bloom. The piece ends, saying this and nothing more—nothing about the longevity of fantasy or the logistical bores that fill any life, no matter how fantastical its premise. It leaves us in the moment where we have leapt off the cliff, where, for one split second, we believe in our own ability to be twenty-one again, to fly.

I am struck by the relatively higher suspension of disbelief, the relatively more potent fantasy of Before Sunset in comparison to Before Sunrise. Anyone, of course, can meet someone on a train. Anyone can spend a night in a strange city with someone they don’t know and walk away with a sweet memory of the encounter. But here, an adult with a life, a job, and responsibilities, I would be remiss to believe that there was a shred of reality in the bolstered circumstance of Before Sunset. It’s a fantasy carved into fantasy.

So of course, Jesse leaves his wife at the end of the film. He does precisely because we can’t. It is a fantasy not because of the circumstance of the first film, but the fact that it leads into a second at all. I am struck by the tragic romantic resonance built up by the circumstance: not tragic for the characters we’re watching, of course, but for ourselves, who cynically never for a second believe in the viability of the relationship rekindled. The tension of the film for me was less “will they or won’t they” and more “they can’t” followed eventually by “oh, they did.”

What does this mean for me or for any of us, who are not quite as young and naïve as they once were? I have lived a lot of life—in three countries, in three states, in some of the biggest cities in the world. I have long given up my belief in fantasies like Before Sunrise, or rather, had my fair share of experiences that resemble theirs.

But I haven’t experienced anything like Before Sunset. And I don’t know what it’s trying to tell me. That the past is important and worth remembering? Or something beyond that—that it’s worth actively dredging up pieces of the past and attempting to glue them back together? No, that can’t be it. The abiding lesson here is likely one of indulgence: that in the course of our human lives, sometimes it’s worth taking a look back on the things we’ve lost and cherishing the alternate realities they might present. After all, the Before trilogy isn’t supposed to be a series of realistic films, but romantic ones, each presenting their own aspect of unreality, and whether or not the stakes of my own life once ran in parallel to the action of these characters doesn’t mean they always will.

And what does all this mean for the third film in the trilogy? Overwhelmed by the potent way in which the second film fit my late-twenty-something sense of unease, I immediately sought out the third film in Linklater’s trio, peering into it like a crystal ball for what fortune-telling powers it may have. And what I found, of course, was confusion.

Viewers, once again, in the years between the films, may have wondered: did Jesse and Céline make it work? In 2013’s Before Midnight, the answer is revealed to us early on: they did, and they didn’t. Instead of giving us an idealized portrait of a couple who found love beautifully and flawlessly in the aftermath of the second film, they give us a relationship that is both happy and sad, flawed and floating. The abiding fantasy becomes, by the end, one of being able to power through: at the end of an argument to come back together and see what made you fall in love with a person all those years ago.

But of course, I don’t really understand Before Midnight. Perhaps because I am only turning thirty, perhaps because I am not married and not yet capable of looking the nuances of this film straight in the eye. Not yet, at least. But if that first version of myself, the one who watched Before Sunrise on a plane, was incapable of seeing the fantasy of Before Sunset, I can only wonder what future delights and torments of my own lurk in this film’s messaging. I’m not there yet, but I am sure, one day, I will find out.

Nicole Horowitz is a writer and former New Yorker, Oregonian, and Madrileño, currently based in Los Angeles. She has an MA degree in English Literature, an affinity for travel and film, and way too many magazine subscriptions.