By Rolf Potts
Note: I have, over the years, occasionally commented on Richard Linklater’s iconic, travel-themed Before trilogy (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, starring Ethan Hawke and Julia Delpy), most notably on Deviate podcast episodes about travel movies and the weird power of nostalgia. The following essay is adapted from a March 2020 journal entry, written just after watching all three Before movies in a single day.
For some reason, a New York Times retrospective with Before Sunrise co-writer Kim Krizan sent me back to the Before trilogy on Amazon Prime – and I spent pretty much the rest of the day watching all these movies in succession. They are as affecting, watching them now, as any time I have seen them before (and I have watched them all many times). They remind me of so much of what I experienced at various times in life in recent decades, even as they remind me of who I was when I first watched them.
Richard Linklater has ended up being a kind of an accidental biographer of my own imaginative longings, and at times his art influenced, or at least affected, experiences I hadn’t had yet. In 1993 Dazed and Confused reminded me of idealized afternoons from five years earlier; in 1995, Before Sunrise instilled a kind of travel idealism that played out in the years that followed.
Watching the Before trilogy is like rereading one’s journals
It was interesting how Celine, in the first two movies, refers to writing in her journals, and here I am writing about Celine in my own journal. Maybe there’s something of a journal-like aspect to watching movies like Before Sunrise or Before Sunset over the years, where the characters are older than you, then younger, then older again, then younger again. It’s like reading a journal entry you made 25 years ago. You remember exactly how you felt when you wrote that, or how it made you feel when you watched that, and it’s startling to know that so much time has passed since then.
There is this conundrum of keeping my journals, and knowing that I am pouring this effort into them, into commemorating these days, even as I know that they are messages to myself, that I am the only one who will really read and understand what they are saying. I guess you write for an audience long enough, and you begin to wonder what happens to everything you write that will only have an audience of you. Do I need someone else to confirm what happened to me at a certain time? Could it be that I certify myself in watching the Before trilogy, and certify Linklater’s life too?
In Before Sunset Celine says, “Did you ever keep a journal when you were a kid? It’s funny, I read one of mine from ‘83 the other day, and what really surprised me is that I was dealing with life the same way I am now. I was much more hopeful and naive, but the core and the way I was feeling things was exactly the same. It made me realize I haven’t changed much at all.”
There is an echo of this in Before Midnight, when she says to Jesse, “Remember that letter, that you let me read that you wrote when you were twenty to yourself at forty? …You are the same guy. I mean, we always think we are evolving but maybe we can’t change that much.” And so it is that I am the same person, or at least I think I am; I am startled that I am this same person, as the Before characters are constantly startled to be living life in real time.
The Before series still evokes something true about travel
There are these true travel moments in the first two Before movies, something to which I have always been attuned. I like it that their trip around Vienna is so random, that they jump off a tram for no particular reason and end up at a record store. That Jesse recalls how clarifying it is to travel, how he needs it after getting dumped, that he didn’t save that much by flying out of Vienna, but he likes being anonymous for a while, being a ghost, knowing he won’t see anyone he knows.
In the second Before movie Celine talks about the way that travel alters time and self, in the context of remembering a teenage trip to Warsaw: “It took me a while to figure out why it felt so different. …I realized that I had spent the last two weeks away from most of my habits. TV was in a language I didn’t understand. There was nothing to buy, no advertisements anywhere. So, all I had been doing was walk around, think, and write. My brain felt like it was at rest, free from the consuming frenzy. It was almost like a natural high.”
I recall thinking when I first watched Before Sunrise how I might act if I were Jesse meeting and interacting with Celine in Vienna. Somehow I feel I would have been obligated to see the play about the cow by the Viennese guys – either out of politeness to them for helping us, or out of not being sure what to do in the city with this pretty girl. I’m not sure if I would have gone in for a kiss as soon as Jesse did, even though there’s a sense that he could have moved in earlier, in the record store. I remember how long it took for me to move in and kiss a girl in Key West when I traveled there at the same age. I feel I also would have gotten contact info from Celine when it was all over. And, as happened after finally kissing the girl in Key West, I would have fucked up the long-distance relationship.
What seems remarkable about these movies, watching them all these years later, is the self-consciousness of life that they bring to their characters’ moments. How they elect to just “make tonight great” in a way that is perfect, even as they long for each other later. “It’s like our time together is just ours, ” Celine says. “It’s our own creation. It must be like I’m in your dream, and you in mine, or something.” I love how that movie ends with Jesse tired and wistful on the bus to airport; Celine tired and wistful on train to Paris; it feels so true and perfect, even in the immediate longing the characters have for what they just experienced.
In Sunrise Jesse talks about feeling like a thirteen-year-old boy, “who just doesn’t really know how to be an adult, pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I’ll really have to do it.” And then, eighteen years later, in Midnight, Celine says, “I always have that feeling. No matter where I am in my life, that’s either a memory or a dream” – and Jesse says, “Me, too. I mean, is this really my life? Like it’s happening right now?”
I could ask that same question of myself, as I sit inside on this warm March morning, thinking about this, watching the Before trilogy, and its relation to my past.
The Before movies are a philosophical meditation on time
The Before trilogy is literally about time, and the constraints of time. In Sunrise Jesse talks about his friend seeing a newborn and realizing it is going to die someday. “Everything is so finite,” he says. “But don’t you think that that’s what, makes our time, at specific moments, so important?”
Nine years later in Sunset, he says: “I don’t have any permanent place here. You know, in eternity, or whatever. And the more I think that, I can’t go through life saying that this is no big deal. I mean, this is it! This is actually happening. What do you think is interesting, what do you think is funny, what do you think is important? You know, every day is our last.”
I forget what I thought the first time he said that, in that movie; I do know that I watch the first movie, Sunrise, with similar affection, but a different point of view. In your mid-twenties having a big pile of future to burn is a good thing, despite the anxieties of youth. You have this big blank optimistic space in life to fill, your future. You watch the same story at the end of your forties and it feels different, since your relationship to that future has shifted by living it (and even if you live it in positive ways, you still miss having it).
There is this sense from Before Sunrise that youthful moments of bliss are best left as such, and that life, when it adds kinds of completeness and continuation, is never as good as all the potential those youthful moments once contained.
Note: I don’t host a “comments” section, but I’m happy to hear your thoughts via my Contact page. To learn more about what this blog is all about, read items #2 and #3 from my update post.
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