Richard Linklater's Before Sunset Trilogy

Richard Linklater’s three-film collaboration with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy turns into a trenchant analysis of the compromises by which contemporary spirits negotiate the minefields of romantic hopes and disenchantment. If it’s hard to find true love it’s harder to sustain it. The development of the two lead characters across three feature films and eighteen years (in the making) allows for a scope and intensity rarely achieved in North American cinema. (Since The Sopranos and Breaking Bad it has become more familiar on cable TV.) The trilogy examines the consistency characters maintain across decades of change, growth and circumstance, and whether a relationship can survive all that. Its arc is from the ultra-romantic to reality.

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In the launch film, Before Sunrise (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) meet on the rebound. Her lover dumped her six months earlier; his resented his visit to Madrid. So they both temper their attraction with reservations. Celine expects romantic disillusionment: “But then the morning comes, and we turn back into pumpkins, right?” For Jesse, “people have these romantic projections they put on everything. That's not based on any kind of reality..... Uh, yeah, sure. I know happy couples. But I think they lie to each other.” From their first game of questioning each other our couple undertake to be truthful. (These exchanges will assume new heft in the third film.)

Their initial meeting is caused by Celine’s retreat from a quarreling German couple on the train. That frictional marriage casts a pall over the young couple’s potential romance. They check their every advance with their agreement they won’t meet again -- until their urgent, last-minute plan to reunite in six months. As Celine initially proposed, "maybe we should try something different. I mean, it's not so bad if tonight is our only night, right? People always exchange phone numbers, addresses, they end up writing once, calling each other once or twice...

Jesse: Right. Fizzles out. Yeah, I mean, I don't want that. I hate that."

Before that, to coax Celine into coming with him for the day in Vienna Jesse asks her to anticipate her inevitable disenchantment with her future marriage. Then she might regret having missed his proposed lark. She should come with him now if only to prove he would not have been a preferable mate: "See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband to find out that you're not missing out on anything. I'm just as big a loser as he is, totally unmotivated, totally boring, and, uh, you made the right choice, and you're really happy.

Celine: Let me get my bag."
In the record shop listening booth their peeking and evasion make for a choreographed dance of glances. Celine later admits, “I like to feel his eyes on me when I look away.” Even their avoidance connects them. Their skeptical detachment ends up a bond. Celine places great faith in a relationship overcoming the barriers of separate personality: "I believe if there's any kind of God it wouldn't be in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something."

The film’s devotion to chronicling their conversation defines their relationship as a spritely exchange between sharp minds -- both emotions and wit -- that is a bracing relief from the physical gratification that characterize the period cinema and that supports Celine’s dismissal of feminism as the male’s convenience. Celine resists her desire to bed Jesse because she doesn’t want to become part of a familiar story, the une-nuit stand. It’s their deepening connection that precludes their having sex:

"Actually, I think I had decided I wanted to sleep with you when we got off the train. But now that we've talked so much, I don't know anymore." 
     Their increasing openness to each other raises their guards against commitment. They most openly express their feelings to each other by pretending to be phoning their best friends. With their candour and playfulness they are paradoxically at once most receptive to and guarded against each other. This the street poet catches:

I'm a delusion angel

I'm a fantasy parade

I want you to know what I think

Don't want you to guess anymore

You have no idea where I came from

We have no idea where we're going

Lodged in life

Like branches in a river

Flowing downstream

Caught in the current

I carry you

You'll carry me

That's how it could be

Don't you know me?

Our would-be lovers connect across opposite views of love. Jesse views it as an “escape for two people who don't know how to be alone. People always talk about how love is this totally unselfish, giving thing, but if you think about it, there's nothing more selfish.” For Celine, despite the pressure to be "a strong and independent icon of womanhood, and without making it look my whole life is revolving around some guy.... loving someone, and being loved means so much to me. We always make fun of it and stuff. But isn't everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?"

     Celine also differs from Jesse’s expectation of fatal irritations: "When you talked earlier about after a few years how a couple would begin to hate each other by anticipating their reactions or getting tired of their mannerisms,I think it would be the opposite for me. I think I can really fall in love when I know everything about someone-- the way he's going to part his hair, which shirt he's going to wear that day, knowing the exact story he'd tell in a given situation. I'm sure that's when I know I'm really in love."

Despite both characters’ wariness and hard won skepticism, their mutual attraction grows, bolstered by their withdrawal apparently first from sex, then from their pledge never to meet again. It becomes an extraordinary romance, eyes wide open albeit yearning and tentative.

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Before Sunset (2004) picks up the story nine years later. Jesse is in Paris on a book tour promoting his bestselling novel, This Time, based on that first meeting with Celine. Three journalists expose themselves in their response to the novel’s after-story. The romantic is sure the lovers make their date, the cynic that they don’t. The realist hopes they would but doubts they will. When Celine appears we learn she missed their planned meeting because of her grandmother’s death. We also learn later that on that first date Jesse and Celine did make love. An editing ellipsis left us at her resolve to avoid the pain of missing him all the more for that intimacy. 

Now again Jesse invites Celine to share his time before his flight home. Their wanderings through Paris rekindle their conversational intimacy and their love. They discuss desires, dreams, living with losses, and their new lives. Both express dissatisfaction. Environmentalist Celine has a mercifully roving photojournalist boyfriend. The photojournalist is a prosaic alternative to the novelist.  “Even being alone it's better than sitting next to your lover and feeling lonely.” Jesse has a wife, son and low octane marriage. 

Both have lived in the shadow of their missed romance. He dreams of Celine; she rues his loss. On his drive to his wedding Jesse thought he saw her entering a deli on 13th and Broadway. She was living at 11th and Broadway at the time. In their last drive Celine resents having lost all her romance on that first night with Jesse and having lived hollow since.

Again they are united by their differences. Jesse bristles at Celine’s naming her “Commie” cat Che. For Celine, “Memories are wonderful things, if you don't have to deal with the past.” Jesse bases his fiction on the assumption everything is autobiographical. He thinks it’s true that he wrote the book hoping it would find Celine. He has his own jocular take on her global concerns: “I don't even have one publisher in the whole Asian market.” Jesse thinks he has grown “more equipped to handle” his problems. For Celine “It's amazing what perverts we've become in the past nine years.” They tease each other about their presumed promiscuity since their first date.

The constraints of time in their relationship figure in the titles of Jesse’s novel and of Nina Simone’s Just in Time to which Celine dances for him in her apartment. But they were thwarted not just by the timing of the grandmother’s death but by their youthful folly in having failed to exchange addresses and phone numbers. As Celine realizes, “I guess when you're young, you just believe there'll be many people with whom you'll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.” And “You can never replace anyone because everyone is made up of such beautiful specific details.” So too her faith in her fellow activists: ”I see it in the people that do the real work, and what's sad in a way is that the people that are the most giving, hardworking, and capable of making this world better, usually don't have the ego and ambition to be a leader.”

Where in the first film Celine looked for “any kind of God” not “in any of us, not you or me but just this little space in between,” here she focuses on their individual beings: "Well, you know, the world might be less free than we think.... Yeah, when given these exact circumstances, that's what will happen every time: two part hydrogen, one part oxygen, you get water every time." Later she hugs Jesse because “I want to see if you stay together or if you dissolve into molecules.” To his relief she feels him “still there.” On their first date Celine had more faith in her emerging bond with the new man. On the second she is more focused on the individual than on the space between them. 

  As the Sunset lovers expressed their true feelings through imaginary phone conversations with a friend, here Celine seduces Jesse through Simone.  Jesse has returned “just in time.” At the film’s close we expect he will overcome the wedding ring he fingers and will miss his flight home, in order to make love to Celine. Before her Simone dance, in a parallel to the first film’s street poet, Celine sings her waltz to their “lovely one night stand”: 

  I don't care what they say

I know what you meant for me that day

I just want another try, I just want another night

Even if it doesn't seem quite right

You meant for me much more than anyone I've met before

One single night with you, little Jesse, is worth a thousand with anybody

I have no bitterness, my sweet

I'll never forget this one night thing

Even tomorrow in other arms, my heart will stay yours until I die.

As with the first poet’s use of “milkshakes,” Jesse jocularly asks if Celine just slipped his name into the set song. But his cynicism veils his emotion. 

Conversely, Celine’s denial of “bitterness” in her song is belied by her anger in the limo ride. However painful, Celine protects her memory and her emotional connection to Jesse with the fervour of a true environmentalist. The heart is its own landscape. The writer may play a variation on his past but the environmentalist will preserve it against all the antipathetic and destructive currents of nature, including the pathetic human.

As her song recalls the poet, another exchange evokes the fortune teller in the first film. When Jesse wonders at “the chances of us ever meeting again” Celine replies "After that [missed] December, I'd say almost zero. But we're not real anyway, right? We're just, uh, characters in that old lady's dream. She's on her deathbed, fantasizing about her youth. So of course we had to meet again."

As Hawke and Delpy collaborated with Linklater on the second (and third) script, the film assumes a kind of metafiction. Matured by time, loss, experience, the characters sense they are characters.

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When we resume that relationship in Before Midnight (2013), nine years later, Jesse has divorced his wife and is living in Paris with Celine. They have twin daughters, realizing Celine’s Sunset joke about having two children she forgot having locked in a car somewhere. Jesse has a second novel out, That Time, based on the Sunset chapter in their relationship. They spend a summer at a writer’s retreat in rural Greece. This setting suggests a return to more pagan emotions -- e.g., the motherhood of Medea -- as opposed to the civilization of their Vienna and Paris.

  An outside dinner at their writer host’s presents a spectrum of  relationships: a widow, a senior in an open marriage, an exuberant middle-aged couple, two beautiful romantics in their first year of love. The narrative reflects on where Celine and Jesse align on that range. Jesse considers their moving to Chicago so he could be a stronger presence in his 12-year-old son’s life. This as Celine contemplates an offer of her “dream job.” Celine takes Jesse’s idea as the clear beginning of their end. 

On an easy walk they resume the witty, thoughtful, loving conversation of the earlier films. There’s a comfort in her quip, “But sometimes, I don't know? I feel like you're breathing helium and I'm breathing oxygen.” But when they enjoy a romantic hotel gift stay they spin out of sexual ardour into anger. Jesse is irritated by Celine’s cellphone chat with his son. They explode. Now Cellne has a visceral experience of the feminism she rejected earlier.  She resents all she gave up for him and their daughters, including her singing. Of course Jesse appreciates her talent:  “I fucked up my whole life because of your singing.” She erupts in frustration and anger, stomping out, returning only to stomp out again, finally declaring she does not love him anymore. To even our disappointment our lovers have turned into the German couple from whom they recoiled on that initial train to Vienna. To Jesse his dream girl is now “the fucking mayor of Crazytown,” her French quirkiness gone sour. 

Their break was anticipated when the couple watched the sun set. Celine remarks “Still there. Still there. Still there. It’s gone.” Saddened, she glances across at the unsuspecting Jesse, as if she already realizes -- by that phrase’s echo of Sunset -- that the Jesse she loved and hugged is gone, his molecules dissipated. 

Ultimately Jesse wins her back -- at least for the moment -- with another echo, this time his Sunrise invitation to leave the train to spend the day with him in Vienna. He originally said she owed it to her future, married self to check out the possibility of their relationship. This time he again plays that time machine, reading off a bare napkin her advice as an 82-year-old to her present self. The old charm, the wit and games and loving exuberance, work again. This time. 
        Celine’s last line returns to metafiction: “Well it must have been a hell of a night we’re about to have.” The third film ends on the same uncertainty as the first. But we have seen a crucial difference emerge between the two lovers. The man has grown, succeeded, matured but he has remained the same. He still plays the old games. He stays a boy at heart, as when he playfully kicks his departing son in the rear. The woman may seem the more recessive, because of her domestic obligations, but she has changed and grown in her awareness and emotional range. If she stays with her juvenile man it's out of fatigue not passion. He hasn't grown with her.
      On the other hand, Jesse remains the more realistic. He accepts Celine in all her craziness (read:dissatisfaction, change). He realizes that love is what's left when the magic is gone. She yearns for the lost magic. She refuses to let him use her or their children in his fiction, as if he had his own trilogy in the works. But he won't let her colonize and command his imagination. So their conversational differences have hardened into an abyss.

As the finale draws on our memory of the earlier films the implication is that however our characters have changed, however advanced or hardened their circumstance and understanding, they sustain a consistent core. There is a bedrock in each character and a bedrock to their relationship upon which both can draw, if they choose. But a common growth is as important as that bedrock.

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The lovers in this trilogy are a winning combination of beauty, ribald wit and energy, intelligence, thoughtfulness and unguarded love. Most of us are not like that, though we would like to be. To highjack Kenneth Tynan on Garbo, they sober talk like we drunk think we do. Or, their combination of sensuality and intellect harkens back to the wit of John Donne and the Metaphysical poets, before -- as T.S. Eliot contended -- our emotions and our mind were separated, our sensibilities dissociated. Hence in all three films, amid the fluent intellectualizing the lovers’ profane teasing, a hairbreadth short of insult. If the final hotel battle evokes late Bergman, the trilogy’s overall intelligence and fine observation are as close as American cinema has come to Eric Rohmer.

All three titles place their film’s action on a turning point, one of the infinite number of axes on which our life and emotions turn. Each film chronicles a day of adventurous conversation that ends on the title’s close. It’s Before sunset, Before sunrise, Before midnight. We’re always on the verge of something, which denotes both a loss and an advance. But whatever the passage we retain a consistent core and so can our dearest relationships. We accrue experience and connections to which we can cling, against the tide. The titles promise a snatch of life bracketed off from the characters’ respective flows. The constraints that time imposes on both figures in each film is an emblem of all the other constraints, repressions, fears, timidities, that life has seared into them, that we can transcend if -- as Jesse finally urges Celine -- we grow with the flow but must acknowledge the limitations of reality. 

         Now that the trilogy is complete, here's a suggestion. Watch them in reverse order. Knowing where the lovers end up, trace the route -- or roots -- that got them there. As in Pinter's Betrayal, the weight of romantic confidence and delusion is best exposed when the hopeful beginnings are checked against their conclusion.