Before Sunset directed by Richard Linklater Just Jesse. I’m Celine.
Over the course of 18 years, Richard Linklater has created a trilogy quite unlike any other. Though
only giving us brief glimpses into the lives of Jesse and Celine; their first meeting, their brief
reunion, and a day in their eventual marriage, the accumulated impact of these reaches far beyond the
sum of its parts. It’s a beautiful portrait of a relationship evolving over the decades,
starting out young and somewhat naïve, moving past that first disillusionment to reconcile what you
thought life would be like with what it actually is, and then trying to reverse all that in a way,
trying to rediscover and reconnect to that initial spark in the everyday trenches of adult existence.
But while this is a fascinating and valuable deconstruction in its own right, the Before
trilogy is also so much more; it’s the story of love as the prime directional force of our lives,
as that what we dream of, what we chose for, and what we work hard for to keep alive.
I guess when you're young, you just believe there'll be many people with whom you'll connect with. Later in life, you realize it only happens a few times.
And you can screw it up, you know, misconnect. As the great Fred Rogers once said; “love is
at the root of everything. All learning, all parenting, all relationships. Love or the lack
of it.” Indeed, while their dreamlike romance in Before Sunrise could have been just that,
a first love at that time when you were still young enough to experience it purely, unencumbered
by the reality and complexity of adulthood, a coming of age moment that is bound to fade away
as the years go by, as we meet Jesse and Celine again in Before Sunset, it also becomes clear,
in a both beautiful and tragic way, that the love they experienced together wasn’t all youthful
illusion, that while maybe still being somewhat rudimentary, inexperienced and untested by time,
there was a tangible force at its center that is not to be dismissed, but rather to be nourished
as we grow older. For as we see in Before Sunset, the absence of it has severely impacted
both Jesse and Celine, and not for the better. We're just living in a pretense of a marriage
responsibility, and all these ideas of how people are supposed to live.
It’s the challenge of any young adult, I guess, to struggle with that conception of love as we first
got to know it, and how it exists in our lives in the present. Obviously it would be naïve to
think that it would always be as it was, but then again, how much of the dream do we sacrifice? How
far do we compromise? And how do we know that what we have left is still enough? If anything,
the great and liberating joy of this phase of the story is that no matter how we might answer these
questions, what Jesse and Celine prove here is that it’s never too late to turn things around
if we want to, if we have to. It demonstrates that love isn’t necessarily subjected to entropy,
but that it can actually grow stronger, deeper, and connect us closer to ourselves and to those
who we choose to spend our lives with. This is not to say our lives necessarily become easier,
as Before Midnight so poignantly shows us in its final chapter. In fact, choosing love might actually demand us to be more conscious, more hard-working,
and it might wreak more havoc on our hearts than a life without it. But I guess that’s the point,
isn’t it? That if love is at the root everything, there is no real life without it.
