Director Richard Linklater’s BEFORE films form a living triptych of captured moments between two people.

“I feel we have some kind of connection,” a barely post-adolescent Jesse (Ethan Hawke) says to Celine (Julie Delpy) in the first few moments of BEFORE SUNRISE, and she agrees. On the strength of that, the pair decide to spend the night before Jesse’s flight back to the United States wandering around Vienna together. At the end of their time, they make a pact to meet up again in six months. In BEFORE SUNSET, we learn who made the meeting and who didn’t, and why. The spark is struck again as they discuss their memories of that night and the events of the past nine years. If BEFORE SUNRISE and BEFORE SUNSET are films about the hints and beginnings of fire, BEFORE MIDNIGHT is about how to stoke a blaze.

Between films, the characters sharpen into focus, gaining definition with time.

The intensity of their meetings is heightened by their occurrence outside of day-to-day reality, and Celine and Jesse know this. For this reason, the events that transpire in BEFORE MIDNIGHT both break and maintain the pattern of the previous films. The BEFORE films always find Celine and Jesse at potential turning points in their life trajectories, and in each film, it takes time before certain truths come out. In BEFORE SUNRISE, Jesse was on the train only because of a relationship that ended in Madrid. In BEFORE SUNSET, he is married and has a child; Celine has a boyfriend with whom she is emotionally distant. Between films, the characters sharpen into focus, gaining definition with time. Celine points out the crease in Jesse’s forehead. She takes her hair down to mimic the girl she was on the train nine years before. BEFORE MIDNIGHT reveals the forty-year-olds the soft-faced dreamers who stepped off the train in Vienna have become. The three films are one long conversation, interrupted by absence and punctuated by everyday existence. The threads and themes that turn up in BEFORE MIDNIGHT have their roots in Celine and Jesse’s first night together, recurring in the perpetual resolution of trying to know another human being.

Although Celine was and is a romantic, she has grim undercurrents that surface in a macabre humor that Delpy exhibits wonderfully. In BEFORE SUNRISE, Celine is obsessed with goodbyes, with death and the seconds preceding it. In BEFORE SUNSET she jokes about being being raped and murdered, about being a careless parent who leaves her children in the car with the windows up. She has quit a government job to work directly for an environmental organization. “The world is fucked,” she declares in BEFORE MIDNIGHT, on the verge of taking a government job again, because she now feels working outside the system accomplishes nothing. Celine constantly wrestles for an equilibrium of existence, shifting between moments of neurosis and transcendence. Between those exertions she finds the things that delight and sustain her.

“It’s okay to want things as long as you don’t get pissed off if you don’t get them,”

Ethan Hawke’s Jesse moves from the personification of callow earnestness in BEFORE SUNRISE to something more self-aware. Still cognizant of his shortcomings, he has grown accustomed to the discomfort they cause him, as if he finds the erosion of age mitigated by acceptance of flaws and faults. “It’s okay to want things as long as you don’t get pissed off if you don’t get them,” he points out in BEFORE SUNSET, but the measure of want is as long as life, and if Jesse isn’t pissed off, he isn’t giving up, either. At thirty-two he comes closer to being good at something than he was at twenty-three; at forty-one, with further success under his belt, he is still beset with difficult desires, pulled in multiple directions. Younger Jesse imagined himself choosing between what and who he would be, but older Jesse is unwilling to relinquish either.

You don’t have to like love stories, or even like Celine and Jesse as characters, to enjoy the BEFORE films, but you might have to be a voyeur for existential detail. The pair don’t always like themselves; their narrative is uncomfortable because it is emotionally honest even when the characters are not, told with a degree of self-absorption inevitable in a story so close to the bone. Life is small, because we are finite, transients in existence, but it is vast because our horizons are vast. One life-changing decision settles nothing for Celine and Jesse. Instead, it opens up new futures to be negotiated.

… the BEFORE films feel familiar because they contain elements of our own lives not lived and roads not taken …

It would be easy to conceive of a novel written to cover a span of eighteen years by examining three brief interludes in the lives of the characters, but to play out such a tale with active participants is rare. The BEFORE films offer the opportunity to see the minute effects of the passage of time in motion, the maturity of the creators and performers evolving with the telling of the tale. The result is a consistency of articulation that is astonishing, an achievement for Linklater as a writer/director, Kim Kruzan as writer, and Delpy and Hawke as writers and performers. The concept of a written life is both narrative and indulgently rhapsodic meta-narrative within the films.

Young Jesse does not know what it is he wants to be good at, but he engineers events in the second film, to a degree, by writing a book. In BEFORE SUNSET he talks about a book which takes place in the space of a single pop-song; in BEFORE MIDNIGHT, he is working on a book in which the characters are linked through viewing ON THE WATERFRONT at different moments in time. Although these conversations deliberately remind the viewer of the constructed nature of a media-based, time-shifted experience, they don’t propel one out of it. Entertaining the ways in which art intersects with experience is part of the show, limitless imagination ever in conflict with the structure of reality. Jesse-at-23 suggests to Celine that their shared night is time-travel, a way for her to preemptively determine the outcome and worth of the might-have-beens in her future past; but as with all time-travel narratives, he runs up against the question of whether or not mucking around with might-have-beens changes the future. In BEFORE MIDNIGHT he brings up time-travel again, persuading Celine that her future self has already had a certain experience in a conceit both compelling and transparent.

“At the end of the day, it is not love of one other person, it is love of life.”

Imagining about how one’s life might be different is not uncommon practice, and the BEFORE films feel familiar because they contain elements of our own lives not lived and roads not taken, our own made and missed connections. They evoke the eras in our own personal evolutions, the time in which no one could tell us anything, the time in which we made our own decisions at last, the time in which we recognized where we did or did not fit into the frame of the universe. In BEFORE SUNRISE, the couple consult a number of oracles throughout their night together, including a fortune-teller and a street poet. In BEFORE SUNSET, they are isolated, their interactions only with one another, their great decision a moment for them only. In BEFORE MIDNIGHT the scope of their tale widens to include family and friends, who have become players of importance.

In BEFORE MIDNIGHT, a scene takes place in which Celine and Jesse eat a meal with friends. The table is circled by couples young, middle-aged, old, and fragmented by death, resurrecting the ghosts of their past and prompting a vision of a future in which only Jesse or only Celine is present. “At the end of the day,” says their host, Patrick (Walter Lassaly), “It is not love of one other person, it is love of life.” This is the appeal of the BEFORE films; they are, as they appear, a story of two people, but they are created and fueled by a larger passion for life and hunger for stories within stories. “Is that true?” Celine asks Jesse in BEFORE SUNSET, as he concludes an anecdote about German soldiers sparing French monuments in WWII, overcome by their beauty. “I don’t know,” he admits. “I always liked the story, though.”

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