An elderly couple sit together on a train, the wife reads the newspaper as the husband stares out the window lost in thought. A younger middle-aged German couple argue about something, the husband reads the newspaper while the wife gets up and leaves her seat. This public friction clearly annoys the young twentysomething French woman sitting across from them in the carriage. Celine decides to move a few seats away to get some peace. Sitting across from her is Jesse, a twentysomething American man. Jesse notices her and sparks up a conversation.
These opening shots of the film Before Sunrise contain the DNA that would characterise the evolution of the central relationship between Jesse and Celine across three films entitled The Before Trilogy directed by Richard Linklater. The very first dalliance of a life-long relationship. The middle-aged couple falling into dangerous waters of familiarity. The elderly couple in silence, pondering what remains of their lives together. Linklater presents us with three distinct couples, all at various stages of their lives. Little did I know, as a 14 year old boy, watching this scene on my own in a Galway cinema in 1995, how much of a profound impact this film and its two sequels would have on my own life.
Linklater explores the concept of time and relationships in several of his films including Boyhood and Waking Life. In Boyhood, Linklater depicts a young child growing into a young adult on screen over 2 hours and 45 minutes. Having shot the movie in different sections over the course of the actor’s life the viewer has the uncanny experience of seeing the boy go through childhood and adolescence and finally emerging as a young adult by the end of the running time. In Before Sunrise however, the viewer is a silent witness to the first 24 hours of what will be the most significant relationship of both character’s lives. In The Before Trilogy, each instalment was filmed with a 9 year gap between them. The significant difference here is that the viewer has also aged 9 years with the characters. It is this aspect of the trilogy which makes it unique. It is hard to think of another director, apart from Christopher Nolan perhaps, who has explored the thematic vagaries of time and fate as deftly as Richard Linklater. Before Sunrise sees Linklater adopt a European style of writing and directing. He embraces the visual language of great French directors like Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut in that the film is very dialogue-centric, utilising setting and conversation to convey the subtle minutiae of human relationships.
Before Sunrise is the first of three films charting the development of Jesse and Celine’s relationship. Both characters are young, idealistic and hungry for experience. Their paths first cross on the train journey with Celine heading back home to Paris and Jesse aimlessly wandering around Europe like some quixotic throwback to Hemingway or Kerouac. We see the initial stages of love blossoming. The backdrop of the mountainous Austrian countryside, framed by the train window, perfectly accompanies the couple’s playful early interactions. They both open up to each other. Jesse shares an anecdote about witnessing a ghostly image of his deceased grandmother as a child. Celine is clearly taken with his telling of the story, Linklater expertly capturing the small looks of admiration and attraction that flit between them. The use of 35mm film adds an element of classicism which enables the film to transcend space and time. It heightens the dreamlike quality of the film and what it conveys to the viewer. It comments on the romanticisation of memories we hold dear versus the reality of what actually occurred. Lee Daniel, the cinematographer, also worked with Linklater on his earlier film Dazed and Confused (1993) as well as Boyhood (2014).
Jesse’s stop is Vienna. He manages to persuade Celine to disembark and join him for one day walking around the Austrian capital. In this moment, Linklater explicitly comments on the nature of chance and fate. Jesse, instead of leaving it to chance, presents the scenario of the potential painful pang of regret they both would experience later in their lives if they did not seize this opportunity to spend a day in Vienna together. Celine relents and so begins their perambulations around the beautiful Vienna.
In some ways, Jesse and Celine represent the mingling of American and French sensibilities, both culturally and in Linklater’s style of film making. Jesse’s somewhat brash ham-fisted attempt on the tram-ride to steer Celine toward conversations regarding sex are met with a measured, detailed and and direct response from Celine. She describes her first crush as a teenager for a young dolphin like swimmer to Jesse, describing how they both wrote declarations of love to each other promising they would meet up again soon. She declares that this did not happen however, foreshadowing events between the end of the first movie and the second. Jesse’s brash American openness is perfectly met with Celine’s French matter of fact responses. Again, a parallel can be drawn with Linklater, The Texan high school sports star, wearing the cinematic and visual accoutrement of The French New Wave.
Linklater uses setting as visual metaphor to ruminate on the inexorable passage of time. Their first kiss occurs on the famous Viennese Giant Ferris Wheel overlooking the capital city. This moment in time, forever set in aspic, will be repeated in their heads much like the eternally revolving Ferris Wheel. Their visit to the cemetery, Friedhof Den Namenlosen (Cemetery of the Nameless), sees Celine recounting to Jesse how she first visited the cemetery when she was 13. Her attention had been captivated by the grave of a 13 year old girl. They were the same age then but now Celine is 10 years older. The Before Trilogy affords the viewer a similar perspective, to view a character across time. The grave of the young girl serves to remind both Celine and the viewer about the value of time, or more importantly, what we should do with our precious time. The commonality between Celine and the girl is that they both were unaware of what their future lives would bring them. Marriage. Broken friendships. Joy. Misery. The difference however is that Celine will have the opportunity to experience these things; the girl will not. Time stands still, at least for a while.
On another occasion, sitting outside a cafe, a palm reader approaches the couple and reads Celine’s palm. She exclaims to her that she is an ‘adventurer of the mind’ and that she ‘needs to resign’ herself ‘to the awkwardness of life.’ The palm reader then briefly examines Jesse’s palm and states they will be ok and that ‘he is still learning.’ Jesse’s response is one of cynicism, rubbishing the notion that the palm reader was anything but a charlatan. Celine, on the other hand, expresses a certain level of investment in her predictions for the future. Despite the fact that Celine may be simply providing a counterpoint to Jesse’s jaundiced view of the palm reader, we see the seeds of an aspect of their relationship which manifests later on in the trilogy in a more significant and detrimental way - that aspect being their worldviews.
In perhaps one of the most beautiful sequences in the movie, we see Jesse and Celine enter a record store called Alt und Neu. After rifling through albums from artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Zappa and The Kinks, Celine stumbles on an album by a singer songwriter named Kath Bloom. Jesse notices a listening booth at the end of the store and asks if she wants to go listen to the album. What follows is a masterclass in acting subtlety and finesse. As Bloom’s hauntingly alluring track Come Here plays, several looks are exchanged between the two, yet they never look at each other at the same time. Each actor manages to look away the very millisecond the other’s eyes are cast in their direction. It is as if each of them are attempting to synchronise, to capture time, yet they can’t. The slight awkwardness, the clear attraction, the longing and the yearning are all encapsulated here in this scene with Kath Bloom acting as the soundtrack.
The denouement of the film is punctuated by a sequence of static setting shots that the couple visited over the course of their time together on this one day in Vienna. Each shot is framed in the same manner as they were first presented to the viewer earlier in the film, however the mise- en-scene has changed. Jesse and Celine are now absent. The images still contain some objects left behind by the couple however: an empty wine bottle on the grass for example. An elderly woman slowly limps across the grass unaware of the previous night’s proceedings between Celine and Jesse. Perhaps this physically fragile woman once met her own Jesse at one point in her life, perhaps not. It is a highly evocative and visually poetic sequence.
The viewer is reminded of the thousands of locations visited across one’s life that still exist, minus them. It speaks of the yearning for the ideal, that one time in our lives where everything shimmered for a short time, when time was irrelevant, a blanket worn to keep us warm. In Galway, there is an empty cinema seat still there. A seat where my life became profoundly intertwined with the lives of Jesse and Celine. A seat where art changed me and made me yearn for a future life as yet unlived, and a future Celine as yet unloved.