After Nine Years: Before Sunset
By Sarah Stodola
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Before Sunset
Starring
Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke
Directed
by Richard Linklater
Before
Sunrise, which came out nine years ago, follows two early-twenty-somethings
(played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) who meet on a train to Vienna
and subsequently spend a night wandering the streets and parks of that
photogenic city. Amazingly, the film successfully relied completely
on the dialogue of two individuals. There are no fights, no sex
scenes, no tears. There was no event in the movie larger than these two
strangers deciding to hang out for the night, or deciding not to keep
in touch, or then taking it back at the very last second. Instead
of big moments, the movie’s charm exists in its accumulation of
little ones. Celine, a French girl on her way home, and Jesse, a newly
dumped American trying to pull himself back up, beguiled us with their
idiosyncrasies, their earnest desire to figure the world out, with their
ambition, and with their neuroses. They were intelligent, but still searching
for a purpose. As they prepare to leave Vienna the next morning,
they agree to meet back in the exact spot they are standing, six months
later.
For all of its ingenuity, Before Sunrise can barely be considered to have been a hit, bringing in less than $23 million worldwide. Still, those who did see it were moved. And those responsible for the movie’s creation must have been similarly attached. They waited nine years to make a sequel to a movie that barely made a profit, because it took that long for a sequel to become warranted.
The story of Celine and Jesse resumes in Paris in the summer of 2003. Jesse is now a successful author on the last leg of his European book tour, and Celine is an ardent defender of the environment for a fictional organization that seems to be modeled after Greenpeace. She'd seen his picture on a brochure in this, her favorite bookstore, several weeks earlier and decided to show up at his reading.
We soon learn that Jesse kept his end of the bargain, returning to Vienna six months after their initial meeting, while Celine was forced to stand him up because of her grandmother’s funeral. Because they had never traded phone numbers or mailing addresses or even last names, the unkept appointment was assumed by both of them to be the end of the affair.
Let’s stop here for a moment and acknowledge, right up front, that this movie is not perfect. Jesse’s spotting Celine in the midst of his reading, and his subsequent faltering through the remainder of it, is a cliché that has been done in film a few too many times - even though here it is produced at the beginning of the movie, rather than at the climax. And there are a couple of scenes in which Ethan Hawke comes across as either whiny or creepy, even though every time he recovers quickly. Finally there are a couple of inconsistencies between the plot of Before Sunrise and its mention in Sunset. The most glaring of these is “how far they went” that night in Vienna. In the original movie, they decide not to have sex. In the sequel, they seem to think that they actually had sex twice. We rarely remember things completely accurately, of course, but this seems like a pretty big false memory.
But the movie succeeds because we knew these two characters nine years ago - we knew how much possibility there was in their lives, and we knew how passionate they were about realizing their potential - and even though we find them just as infatuating now as we did then, we are now forced to acknowledge that life didn’t pan out the way Jesse's and Celine's idealized, youthful selves were sure they would (and probably, this inspires a similiar reflection on our own lives). The two are now 32 years old. Jesse is married with a young son, and Celine has a live-in boyfriend. Upon reuniting with each other, though, they both realize that they are not as happy as they could be, if they are happy at all. They are filled with regret, and so are we, the viewers, because we know as well as they do that their lives might have been altogether different had they found each other again in Vienna. They are not only lacking real love, but also challenge. The frustration is heightened as the pair learn they were both living in New York City, at the same time, a few years earlier.
This time around, the stakes are infinitely higher for Celine and Jesse. Ultimately, this is just what makes the movie work. Watching it, one becomes filled with regret for these two characters; If only things could have been different that day they were supposed to reunite.
Indeed, this is one sequel that was not made for money; it was made to break our hearts.
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Sarah Stodola is the Managing Editor of Me Three. She can be contacted here.
©
2004 Me Three