Classics - The Before Trilogy
Three films nine years apart from each other track the evolution of a couple through single days of their lives and their conversations. Despite the limited style, it's pure movie magic.
If you haven’t heard about Before Sunrise, Before Sunset or Before Midnight, I suggest you open your streaming services and watch any of these films to get a sense of their magic. Of course, watch them in order, but funnily enough when I was more of a kid, I didn’t know it was a trilogy, so I watched Before Midnight first, and worked through a reverse chronological order. Truth is, it was still deeply affecting and did not need any context for the previous films. It is as if they worked as a Julio Cortázar novel.
Beware of spoilers before reading this. Talking about each film means spoiling the film that came before it, so keep that in mind.
Real-Time Magic: Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy
Before Sunrise is a production from the United States and Austria, released in 1995. Before Sunset is a production from the United States and France, released in 2004. Before Midnight is a production from the United States and Greece, released in 2013.
Rarely does a trilogy of films manage to exude such a high level of quality, interconnected level of enjoyment but fierce individuality as that achieved by Richard Linklater and his two actors Ethan Hawke and Julie Deply in his trilogy of films. All of them use a very similar framework and mode of execution and seem to be about similar subjects, but upon deeper inspection, each reveal different things about the human condition, love, romance and the respective ages the characters have. From the meet-cute to the excessive longing to learning to live with disappointment, it’s all there for viewers to discover in a given time, and rediscover as they age.
Richard Linklater is a director who is easy to love, his films are not difficult to understand, are grounded in something real and nostalgic, are deeply entertaining but also maintain a level of quality that separates him from other similar directors as one more concerned with film as an art form rather than a tool for commerce. He is deeply concerned with the passage of time and coming of age, as his magnum opus, 2014’s Boyhood suggests, which managed the almost impossible feat of tracking the growth of a child in real time, filming for 12 years and discovering a narrative as it unfolded.
Many people -myself included- criticized the film and the praise that it got, claiming that without its narrative gimmick it wouldn’t amount to nothing. However, I now think that even though those opinions are at least half true, they reveal deep thematic elements that would otherwise never exist in film. It’s no wonder Linklater is trying to repeat Boyhood’s magic with his new project, filming the Sondheim Merrily We Roll Along which, as of this writing, should have five of its 20 years of filming complete.
In regards to his style, Linklater claimed that one of his main influences is French director Eric Rohmer, who managed to capture real conversations and human interactions by emphasizing improvisation over everything else. In capturing this sense of spontaneity in his actors, Rohmer looked to reveal truths of the human condition similar to the ones Linklater is looking for. However, in practice Linklater and Rohmer could not be more different despite some superficial similarities. Rohmer’s reincarnation in the 21st Century is definitely South Korean director Hong Sang-soo -I wrote about one of his films In Water in my Best of 2023 list- who starts shooting films based on ideas and gets drunk with his actors on soju and films with whatever material they come up with, and despite the lack of structure, his films, like Rohmer’s, manage to be very affecting.
Rohmer and Hong’s main difference with Linklater is precisely in regards to structure. While the former directors thrive in their absence, Linklater only pretends that his films are unstructured and holds the camera on his actors for long periods of time to deliver precisely the ideas that he has in mind. He manages to reach similar fundamental truths as the improvisational directors do by giving the impression of loose narratives, while his dialogue is sharp, pondering and to the point. In the Before trilogy, this is very clear. All three films revolve around real time conversations occurring in the span of one day, when they meet, when they reunite and when they grapple with their own and each other’s failings. The question is: how does Linklater get away with seemingly not having his cake but eating it too? The answer is collaboration: specially in the latter two films, Ethan Hawke and Julie Deply co-wrote the screenplay alongside Linklater, allowing them to embody a part of themselves in the screen and ensuring that their natural delivery is also informed by their own authorial intent.
Of the three films, Before Sunrise (1995) is the weaker one, but by no means a bad film -it’s quite very good-. Hawke’s Jesse and Deply’s Celine meet for the first time in a train passing through Vienna as both start talking and eventually decide to spend the day together walking through the city. They walk, meet other people, but most of all they get to know each other in a way that seems increasingly more difficult with time. They talk about ideals, the value of romance, their own fleeting experience, the value of their time and how to best spend it, their own hopes and dreams, spirituality, among other things. While Celine is more outwardly romantic and open to the wonders of the world, Jesse is slightly more jaded and cynical. One would think that they maintain these characteristics in the rest of the trilogy, and while they do to some extent, those same characteristics make them act in opposite ways as they age before our eyes.
Before Sunrise is a very idealistic film, one that feels in its early twenties with characters brimming with personality and hope that human connection is something that they get to feel many times. Because of its outright positivity, it suffers from lacking the complexity that the latter two films would get, but it only makes sense for that to happen. Jesse and Celine are still young and only are responsible for their own happiness.
Nine years later, the best film of the three, Before Sunset (2004) is set in Paris and tracks their reunion after they never saw each other again after their magical day together. Jesse is a published author, got married and has a son, and Celine is working in nonprofit organizations and is also in a relationship. They finally find each other in an afternoon and catch up, and both confess their own deep sadness and disappointment. Both are in their 30s, expected more from their lives, and despite being relatively successful professionally, are miserable in their personal lives. The day they spent together in Vienna marked the rest of their adulthood and they never could go back. Despite this film having a happy ending, it is a morally complex decision to say the least.
These are two people that expected more from their lives, feel like they lost nine years by not finding each other, and resort to a moral transgression to make up for what they lost. What of Jesse’s marriage and his son? What of Celine’s relationship? All gone just because of a person you knew for only one day nine years ago? Will it be worth it? It is an act of desperation that they jump to each other’s arms, and because we knew the magic they felt with each other, we see it as a triumph, but it is nothing short of bittersweet.
Before Midnight (2013), the final film, is not as complex as Before Sunset, but it is definitely the heavier one of the three. Here we find the couple on vacation in Greece, they have been together for the past nine years and have twin daughters of their own. The magic they found in their previous meetings now becomes something of the everyday, and with that they find the good but also the very bad in each other. Their conversations are probably the best in the three films, with Linklater, Hawke and Delpy’s professional and emotional maturity reflecting the quality of their intellectual and heartfelt conversations.
However with that maturity also comes a sense of disappointment. Jesse, who was always more cynical and jaded, learned to accept imperfection as a part of life from early on and acted on the small things to make them feel better. But Celine, who was outwardly idealistic and romantic, is deeply saddened by the state of the world and the bad things in their own relationship, and her own romantic point of view makes it harder for her to accept the bad things, resulting in her becoming even more cynical
The ending is ultimately hopeful and one I hope to revisit as I reach Jesse and Celine's age by that time, but again, Linklater shows a couple living real life and going through it, both in real time and separated by long stretches of time. He celebrates their love and correctly identifies it as special, but also recognizes how difficult it is for them to keep their love going in spite of their special connection. Is love transitory or permanent? What is the value of work in a relationship? Is there something they cannot control and how can they be able to accept it after all this time? I guess that is something for each couple to answer, but in any case, Linklater succeeds in making all of us ask those questions, and feel identified with any of the moments that Jesse and Celine go through. He feels there is a part of them in all of us and our relationships, and as he manages with Boyhood, he captures magic out of the ordinary.