Before Trilogy – The Romance Revisited | Jan Lubaczewski

A tradition of romance in cinema is as old as the medium itself. From Reynaud’s Pauvre Pierrot (1892), through Murnau’s famous Sunrise (1927), to Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942), love on the screen has always excited us. It would seem that after over 100 years of movie-making there is not much to be said on the subject. Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy proves the contrary. Its marriage of romantic emotion and genre decomposition makes the films both an experience and a case study. The director analyzes how reality challenges ideas. I would argue that Linklater’s films are precisely about the difference between the world of ideas and the reality. His point of view is in a way a variation on Plato’s theory. The trilogy is also (as most of Linklater’s films, most notably Boyhood) a contemplation on the concept of time. It was never meant to be a trilogy, “it just, somehow, happened”, as Linklater said in one interview. Spontaneity and a sense of complete creative freedom in Linklater’s filmmaking process are what makes him recognizable around the world as one of the truly independent American directors. Although in Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013) he uses the well-known elements of the romance genre, the way in which he does so tells us something about the cinema, the reality, and life in general.

Before Sunrise is a story of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) who meet on a train to Paris. Next morning Jesse has to go back to America from Vienna. When he’s about to leave the train, he asks Celine to get off the train with him, which she does, to his, as well as her, surprise. They spend a magical night in Vienna walking and talking and, eventually, falling in love with each other. If the story seems really banal, that’s probably because it is. It is almost too film-like to believe. What makes the film stand out is its structure. The entire film consists of long shots of the main characters’ heated discussions. What is probably the most interesting is that their conversations usually revolve around great ideas. They discuss love, fate, the boredom of everyday life, and death. On the verge of being really pretentious, Linklater creates an interesting dichotomy. It makes the whole trilogy different from all the other film romances – although the characters talk all the time, the most important moments in the films happen when they are silent, in “the spaces in-between”, to quote Celine. Before Sunrise has been criticized for being “wordy”, even though the main focus of the film is a certain redundancy of words. Linklater deconstructs the genre by formulating a paradox – although the plot is veiled by verbiage, the really important moments happen in glimpses and glances out of time, in silence.

During the second film, Before Sunset, Linklater worked on the script with his actors – Delpy and Hawke. The action of the film takes place in Paris, in 2004. Jesse is promoting his book, whose plot is very similar to the events from Before Sunrise. Both characters have their own separate lives. However, the convention of the film remains the same, only this time Jesse’s plane leaves in a few hours. The characters spend those hours walking around Paris and talking about their lives.

Zofia Klamka & Karol Mularczyk

While the first film may be viewed as a manifest of vitality and freedom arising from youth, the second film is much more melancholic. Maria San Filipo writes in her essay “Growing Old Together” that “Sunset evokes a thirty-something symptom of nostalgia, with its neurotic fixation on missed moments and the past (...)”.

It’s no wonder the audiences around the world did not love the next films of the trilogy as much as they loved Before Sunrise. Linklater’s trilogy, from the second instalment onwards, plays with the idea of romance unsatisfied, tired, lonesome, and nostalgic; in a way, a romance the audience finds a bit uncomfortable to watch since it’s too similar to their own relationships. The second film, besides being slightly different in tone, also begins to play with the infilm references. They are most apparent in Jesse’s book, so similar to the first film, which introduces a meta-narrative aspect. Celine and Jesse make allusions to their first meeting and somewhat ridicule the whole idea of their romance. In the first film both of the characters were very human. In the second film Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke make them real.

Before Midnight, the last part of the trilogy, captures Jesse and Celine on their holiday in Greece. They have two kids, girl twins, and, as we learn, they have been in a relationship for the last 9 years. The film’s structure resembles the previous instalments. However, in Before Midnight we have fewer, yet longer scenes. There are only 7 scenes in the whole movie. The length of the takes allows Linklater to convey the feeling of bitterness and pettiness of everyday life, as well as to create tension between the characters, who are now older and wiser.

Before Midnight is full of self-awareness. Suffice it to say that Jesse wrote two novels by that time – one of them called This Time, and the other That Time. The characters tend to confuse the two with each other. He is also currently working on the third book called Temporary Cast Members of a Long-Running But Little-Seen Production of a Play Called Fleeting. Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke play with the concept of a trilogy and invite the viewers to a more postmodern reading of the film. In that reading, the title of the third book and the fact that Jesse’s last name turns out to be Wallace is not without importance.

The third part of the trilogy, although very bitter and nostalgic, still shows that Linklater’s main focus in those films is reality as he perceives it. Together with his actors, he creates a world in which it is as easy to lose oneself, as to realize how dull and repetitive adult life is. The emotional weight of certain scenes in the film makes them difficult to watch. As in previous parts, the film subverts the audience’s expectations – Jesse and Celine are now over 40 and only slightly resemble the characters from previous films, and their relationship is far from perfect.

In Before Sunrise the ideals that the characters wanted to believe in, are confronted with the difficult reality of middle-age life. There is no escape from the pettiness of everyday life. At one point in the film, Jesse offers Celine “a life that is not perfect, but at least it’s real”. The characters are for some time engaging in similarly abstract conversations that we loved in the first two films, but the majority of their dialogue revolves around everyday life.

Zofia Klamka & Karol Mularczyk

In one of the last scenes of the trilogy, Celine sits next to Jesse in the cafe by the sea, during the sunset, and they watch the sun disappear behind the mountain top. Celine repeats the words “still there” until the sun disappears completely, and then she says: “gone”. She tries to capture a beautiful moment but, as if accidentally, she also asks one of the crucial questions in the film: do Jesse and Celine feel the same about each other after all this time? The hope intertwines with regret creating a masterpiece – it’s great because it’s true.

Linklater in Before trilogy differentiates between “the said” and “the seen”; by combining ideas and reality into one, he in fact symbolically separates them. The most fascinating part, however, is how the life of the filmmaker mirrored the reality of his films. The first film was inspired by the real events from Linklater’s life. In 1989 he met a woman in Philadelphia, Amy Lehrhaupt, with whom he wandered around the city for a night, and with whom he lost contact over time. When he made Before Sunrise in 1995 he was hoping that Amy will watch the film and that they will be able to see each other again. It did not happen in 1995 nor in 2004, when Before Sunset had premiered. In 2010, Amy’s friend informed Linklater that she had died in a motorcycle accident in 1994, before the premiere of the first film. The extremely shocked Linklater dedicated Before Midnight to Amy and later acknowledged that this information had a huge impact on the final shape of the third part of the trilogy.

Richard Linklater’s cinema revolves around time – and by doing that, it allows the viewers to contemplate and question the nature of reality, and the nature of films themselves. In the Before films, his main focus is to show how different the world of ideas and the “real” world really are. The world of Jesse and Celine is real because they are real as well. To capture the moments which would seem impossible to capture has been a lifelong mission of Linklater. He captured what it was like to be a high school student in the 70s, in Dazed and Confused; what it was like to be a college student in the 80s, in Everybody Wants Some!!; to dream in Waking Life; to grow up in Boyhood; to wander around the streets in Slacker, and, finally, what it is like to fall in love. He thus achieved something only the greatest of cinema auteurs are capable of – his ideas change reality.

Jan Lubaczewski

Cover illustration: Zofia Klamka & Karol Mularczyk