Before Sunset
“Before Sunset (2004)”
Text By: Basil Swartzfager
Original Publication Date: August 8th, 2014
Late in Before Sunset Celine tells Jesse that the one-night romance they had over the course of the series’ previous film, Before Sunrise, has ruined romantic relationships for her ever since. Not because it was so romantic that nothing can live up to it, but because it wasn’t real. It was so satisfying in that moment, because it was a fantasy that lacked the baggage of a real relationship. Before Sunrise is a celebration of young love, but the kind of young love that is rooted in an unknowing, fantastical conception of love. Before Sunset takes the space gained by nine years of life experience, and uses it to attack the romantic fantasy attitudes that bore the original film.
We are trained by culture and media to value the kind of love that Before Sunrise represents: love found in a moment, arising from the physical attraction of a young man to a young woman in a situation of pure circumstance. “Wouldn’t it be amazing,” movies tell us, “if your soulmate was sitting just a few seats away on a train?” It’s the kind of attitude that leads women to feel unsafe in public places, constantly on the verge of being accosted by strangers who hope they can create a spark of movie romance in an unexpected situation. Before Sunrise indulges this idea without much distance for reflection or critique. Its focus is the sensuality of conversation and sharing of ideas. Once Jesse and Celine are properly introduced, they become vessels for Linklater to explore his fascination with the rhythms of speech, the sensation of flirting and meeting someone for the first time, the exchange of conversation.
Before Sunset involves those elements too, but at the same time turns the meaning on its head. The film engages with its predecessor to acknowledge the dangerous place that Before Sunrise holds within a pantheon of movies that tell people how easy, how liberating, how immediate love should be. It, and hundreds (probably thousands) of movies like it, ignore the reality of love, the uneven fullness that comes from seeing a person every day and truly knowing them. Celine and Jesse had a lovely tryst, but in fulfilling all the fantasies that they, as twenty-something purveyors of pop culture, had been told they should want from a relationship they created an existential fantasy that reality afterwards could never live up to. Before Sunset works hard to upend these ideals, and show the characters struggling to hold onto reality. Where Before Sunrise consists of a series of cute indie set pieces that comprise an idealized first date, Before Sunset mostly consists of walking through semi-deserted Parisian streets and gardens. It’s still beautiful, but the motivation of the characters isn’t to experience the whole of a city in just a few hours time (as they attempted with Vienna nine years previous), but to spend time together. Before Sunset also ups the awkward pause quotient, the feeling of testing the waters and being unsure where opinions will land, attempts at jokes that don’t quite work but the other person gamely trying to play along. It feels like a first date (even though it is actually a second date) in a way that Before Sunrise, in its quest for a perfectly imperfect movie date, never manages. The film also takes great advantage of the tight rope connection between the two characters, two people who have a shared history but are also essentially meeting for the first time.
Jesse is central to this aspect of the film. He approaches their meeting with a strategy. While Celine has been damaged by the fantasy of their fleeting romance, Jesse has held on to romantic ideals of recreating that night, of continuing as they once had. He wrote a book about that night hoping she would read it. Despite his avowed atheism, he treats their meeting as if it was destiny. While sympathetic to his viewpoint (Linklater is careful to balance both characters this time, where Hawke’s Jesse dominates Before Sunrise), Celine’s points come through so strongly that Jesse feels naive and dopey holding on to the past as he does. From the moment they meet he is determined to extend the moment as long as he can, at one point refusing to let her get out of the car. He has no intention of catching his flight. He desperately clings to their past memory. In spite of her reservations, and the film’s at large, Celine gives in to Jesse’s desires. She wants to recapture the moment as badly as Jesse does, even as she knows it isn’t real. In this way Linklater implicates the audience, who wants it just as badly as Jesse does. We bought into the ending of Before Sunrise, the ambiguous optimism of hoping they met up in Vienna, that they had a beautiful life together. Before Sunset takes that apart, makes us recognize how silly we are for buying into it, and how readily we will buy into it again. When Celine sashays around her apartment doing a Nina Simone impression, and tells Jesse he’s going to miss his plane, we all want him to miss his plane. Even as the film has spent its entire time telling us how foolish we are, how fantastical our notions of love are, we want to jump in again at the first opportunity. Which makes the emotional gut punch of Before Midnight all the more potent, as it tears away even the foundation of our fantasy to show us the rawness of a real, complicated, precarious relationship.
-Basil Swartzfager, 2014
