The opening shots of Before Sunset, released in 2004, depict various city scenes in central Paris. The static shots of streets, shop facades and parks beautifully evoke the closing shots of Before Sunrise, the first of the trilogy. Linklater uses these shots as a visual motif to link the two films despite the separation of nine years in real time. Contrary to the closing shots in Before Sunrise, the locations here are instead waiting for the arrival of Jesse and Celine, not mourning their loss. They are at the beginning of the film and not the end. There is a sense of renewed anticipation for what lies ahead.
The sequel opens with Jesse in the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop on the Left Bank, signing copies of his novel and being interviewed by French journalists at the end of a European book tour. They quiz him on whether the story in the novel, about meeting a French girl on a train, was indeed true or not. He reveals that it was based on a real experience. As he speaks to the journalists, Linklater makes the bold move of using interspersed shots of Jesse and Celine from Before Sunrise which represent Jesse’s memories of this time. They act like his internal visual landscape, his acute attachment to these images still evident nine years on.
In many ways the power of these shots also acts on the viewer’s memory , evoking a strange sense of ennui for an experience that was not only someone else’s, but entirely fictional. The sequences seem iconic. The contrast in the cinematographic style of both movies sets the sequences apart clearly depicting these shots as memories. Hawke is evidently much younger looking in these call backs to the original movie. Linklater subtly plays on the themes of time and memory utilising our own intertextual reference to the original movie while simultaneously depicting Jesse’s internal memories of this time as he speaks to the journalists. The emotional gut-punch is delivered however when the film cuts directly from Celine in 1995 on a street with Jesse to Celine standing in the wings of the bookshop surreptitiously listening to him speak to the journalists in 2004. The edit is profound in its execution and manages to bring the viewer into the here and now, back with Jesse and Celine nine years later.
We are quickly back in familiar territory with the pair walking around Paris for what is the duration of the film culminating at Celine’s apartment. It is revealed that Jessie did indeed return to Vienna six months later to meet Celine but Celine did not. Her grandmother passed away and was buried on the very day she was to return to meet Jessie in Vienna. The burning question that occupied the minds of fans of the first film was finally answered with both camps being satisfied in some respects. Celine now works for an environmental organisation on projects across the globe. Jesse, as mentioned, is now a novelist. Both seem to be living fulfilled lives however the opposite becomes clear as their conversations veer towards more personal territory.
The first seventeen minutes of the film sees the two characters fall into an old familiar groove conversationally as they amble through the streets of Paris. The chemistry is evident. It can’t be overstated how difficult it is to achieve this natural flow and chemistry on screen between two people without coming across as contrived. Hawke and Delpy are masters at work demonstrating their years of experience being filmed being other people.
They stop at a Parisian cafe; Jesse speaks of his hectic trip around Europe selling and signing his novel in twelve different cities. Despite the seeming success Jesse has had with his writing, he is still encumbered with a heaviness and a sense of regret about the last nine years since he met Celine. The writing of Jesse’s novel has essentially brought him back to the novel’s subject - Celine. Was the novel a calling card to Celine or a means for Jesse to repeatedly relive his experience of meeting her in Vienna? The thirteen minute conversation in the cafe depicts a more mature Jesse and Celine speaking about their careers and relationship problems. Yet their curiosity about the world and everything in it still suffuses every word of their conversations. Their inherent curiosity keeps them young.
Celine admits to Jesse that reading his novel earlier that week had depressed her. She clarifies further that it dredged up her own conception of herself at the age of 23, idealistic, hopeful and more spontaneous. The viewer has also been at the mercy of time. We too think of ourselves nine years younger, what our hopes and aspirations were at the time, how we might have changed subtly or substantially. The first film acts like a waypoint in the journey of our lives. Now there is a straight through- line between the first movie and the second, between the younger me and the older me. Ironically, I was 23 years old when Before Sunset was released in 2004 - the same age as Celine in Before Sunrise the first film. This is the power and profundity of this trilogy as a project - the viewer grows and matures with the characters. The universal themes of love, loss and regret come to us all in one form or another. As Celine states to Jessie, ‘Memory is a wonderful thing if you don’t have to deal with the past.’
In the first film, there is an enchanting scene aboard a stationary dining boat in Vienna where they both ruminate on the impending ‘goodbyes’ they would soon need to give each other. In Before Sunset, the two board a tourist boat on the banks of the Seine which affords them a view of Notre Dame cathedral. The difference here is one of movement, of a transition. They are not stationary in this boat but moving forward perhaps reflecting the potential direction of their relationship. While Before Sunrise was imbued with an albeit beautifully realised feeling of loss and regret, Before Sunset depicts a more propulsive phase of their relationship where the potentiality of their deep connection may soon be fully realised.
While on the boat, Jesse ponders why he bothered writing the novel about their first meeting in Vienna nine years previously. He comes to the conclusion that the act of setting their first encounter to words was ‘like building something’ to act as a reminder that they really did meet. The director Richard Linklater based the first film Before Sunrise on a real experience he had with Amy Lehrhaupt, who he met in a toy shop in Philadelphia in 1989. Like Jesse and Celine, he spent the day walking around the city and conversing with her for hours. It was clearly an experience that profoundly affected Linklater. He would never see her again. In 2013, Linklater revealed that Lehrhaupt sadly died in a motorcycle accident before the release of Before Sunrise in 1995. Linklater made his movie for Amy; Jesse wrote his book for Celine.
Celine asks about Jesse’s wife. He reveals that he is at a sort of impasse in his marriage despite his wife being intelligent, pretty and a good teacher and mother. One is reminded of the manner in which he described his own parents’ relationship while walking through the funfair in Before Sunrise. The parallels are clear. Jesse fell into the same relationship quagmire as his parents . In the subsequent car ride to her apartment, Celine expresses her own deep-seated frustration with her own love-life. In quite an intense outburst, she admits that reading Jesse’s novel stirred up equally intense emotions in her. It reminded her of how romantic and curious she was about life and made her yearn for her younger self, for the romance she experienced that night. Jesse then recounts two recurring dreams involving Celine. He would wake up in sobs and sweats beside his wife trying to hide the fact he had been dreaming of Celine. In some ways it is this scene where the dam breaks, where any sense of a facade quickly evaporates revealing how both were profoundly affected by their one night in Vienna and how both still feel unbearable pangs of romantic nostalgia for that night.
The car scene is reminiscent of the tram scene in Before Sunrise. This time however, Celine is sitting on the right and Jesse on the left. In a clear nod to the first film, Celine attempts to touch Jesse’s hair while his head is turned away and is in the middle of baring his soul to her. She retracts her hand in the very same way that Jesse did in Before Sunrise, while Celine begins the tale of her first teenage crush. These clear call-backs to the first film in some ways could be seen as an attempt by the characters to not only reconnect with their younger selves but to connect with the person in front of them in the present. It is an attempt to bring the past crashing into the present, to bring things full -circle. There is a sense that despite both of them being in relationships, that their connection is simply too strong and too profound to not nurture.
The final scene in Celine’s apartment is highly significant in the sense that it is the first time either character has occupied the other’s personal space or habitat. Celine, on the boat, commented amusingly how they were ‘only good at brief encounters walking around in European cities.’ Jesse entering her apartment changes this notion. The threshold has now been crossed. The walk up the spiral staircase is slow, tentative and deliberate. Both characters seem cognisant of the fact that the next few minutes of their lives could potentially change everything. His exclamation of ‘Wow’ as he visually takes in all aspects of her apartment conveys his excitement at finally seeing her personal space, the space which contains all of her interests, her passions and her insecurities. In a beautifully poignant part of the scene, Celine sings a waltz for Jesse that heavily alludes to their first night together nine years ago. Jesse’s name is then mentioned in the final verse much to his clear delight. The scene ends with Celine dancing to Nina Simone and gesturing to Jesse, stating ‘Baby, you are gonna miss that plane.’ Jesse replies with a grin on his face with two words: ‘I know.’ The scene fades to black as Jesse and Celine spend the first day of the rest of their lives together.