Your Movie Sucks.org brought me here. I'd had Before Sunrise on my watch list for years, aware of its ties to Waking Life (which, full disclosure, bored me). The sequel came out and I glossed over it, curious for a moment about the original and passing it by yet again. Until YMS gave it some glowing praise in his review on Before Midnight, and I dove right in to be pleasantly surprised.
Somehow Before Sunrise manages to paint a believable night in the life of a pair of young travelers who fall in love after one follows the other off a train in Vienna. It presents a romance that transcends cynicism while being acutely aware of its own sappiness and unlikeliness. The pair speak philosophically and romantically, and realistically, about their possible newfound love. We're invested from the beginning, we chase them off the train and all around the city, delighting in their ribbing and fawning, falling for them as they fall for each other. And we live through the heartbreak of their separation. We're left with a what if that manages to survive the years to the next movie. It's something you couldn't remake in this age of social media and phones, because they'd just find one another and be more tempted to make contact when they're promising not to write or call. It's only six months until they see one another again, right? It's happening in that perfect and painstaking time when communication wasn't so easy to maintain. The deal is made they meet again and the will they/won't they factor is bittersweet and cute. And we close with a montage of scenes from their evening and the pair contemplating each other alone on their respective rides away.
Nine years pass, rather than six months, and Linklater may have planned this out, but I feel it's more the director sees the opportunity arise when he meets with the original leads, and it births an idea to make a sequel (which it's not, it's part of the long game and the three of them have worked together on this project). Jesse has written a book about his one night of romance and this is used as a mechanism to recap where we left off, while skirting around whether he and Céline have survived or not by discussing the ambiguous ending. There's a genuine disappointment in knowing they didn't reunite until now, Céline confessing she was unable to come to the station. They have to catch up and discover there were missed moments in New York they were close but far away. Jesse has ended up with a strained relationship and a son (who we meet in the third film) and the will they/won't they dilemma plays stronger for the time limit imposed on Jesse and whether he'd be willing to leave his wife for Céline (and of course the wife isn't present physically and the marriage is failing from joylessness and unmet expectations. She has to be Céline's antithesis, but Jesse doesn't want to hurt this other woman any more than he wants his son to grow up in a joyless home). Céline has a photographer boyfriend who's decent but conveniently absent, (another on the list of reasons for your leads to cheat without abject remorse) She's tricked herself into being happy with his absence so she can be together with someone and alone. Céline has suffered more for losing Jesse and he's been broken in his own way, now terrified he'll be trapped in a loveless marriage. All the sparks are there and we're longing for this to happen. And again, we're left hanging, but with more optimism.
By the time another nine years passes, Jesse and Céline have rekindled their love (but remain unmarried), and had twins. Jesse's meta-narrative books serve to recap once again through conversation on the content of the stories and how "the third is better than the original two." But now the tension is coming from the certain strains of differing and disjointed occupations, Jesse getting to continue his writing and having success and traveling while suffering over not being more present in Hank's life, Céline making sacrifices for the sake of her twins and so on. The bickering grows tiresome but in that horrible, realistic way bickering with your lover becomes exhausting because you're still in love but not making headway. (Which is all more poignant for the addition of Hawke and Delphy's personal input into the script.) We can't have the joy of the romance from the first film without the pain of two human beings coming to terms with growing older and seeing the attraction degrade, Céline questioning if Jesse would pick her up on a train now as she is and how she'd refuse him as 41 year old due to real world practicalities. You want them to survive. It presents the cynicism as plainly as the first movie. You'd be disappointed if it was all roses with these two. There are more people in their lives who we actually spend time with this time around. Conversations with others occur, breaking the conventions of the first two films. I can see this as being the least charming and lovable of the three. I liked it ends with some ambiguity and the flourish of hope these two will actually grow old together. And Linklater takes the opportunity to explore the idea of sex and romance online that the first film had yet to consider. Most of his philosophical suppositions and commentary on reality comes out in his films somewhere along the way, it's his ability to twist this into his dialogue so effortlessly makes it more of a joy to listen to. Boyhood did try to cram all of this with a lot of political discourse into the story, but with less effectiveness than he has in other films.
You wouldn't have found this chemistry with another pair of actors over this amount of time. There's no way you could remake this trilogy and capture the same electricity and intrigue you have learning about these two purely through conversation and tension. I think these films work purely through being as natural as they possibly can be. If the dialogue had been forced or stilted, and the chemistry hadn't been there, the original would've been a disaster. No amount of beautiful shots of Vienna and perfect camera work on the train would've saved it.
If you can sell a born cynic like me for three whole films on the notion of romance and love spanning nearly two decades, you've won. If you can discuss the futility of romance and reality forever being at odds without leaving someone like me rolling my eyes and shaking my head, you've succeeded. I did think these would all be pretentious or slow, or unconvincing and contrived. But no. Not at all. It's such an easy trilogy to watch and enjoy. So it goes on my list of amazing and underrated trilogies.
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