Before Sunset

What is love, if not a persistent, nagging feeling? Before Sunset is a terrifyingly realistic movie, meticulously displaying the pulchritude of love whilst also deeply criticising it as a concept. In this film, everything isn’t as it used to be in the past. It’s the collision between what we desire, what we’ve always known we’ve wanted, and how everything ultimately plays out. It’s so tragically beautiful, the tale of Jesse and Celine’s fleeting love story displayed in Before Sunrise; somehow, this movie manages to reunite the two, yet still be MORE devastating than the first. It’s a narrative following two broken people, yearning for a life that never was. Knowing that it didn’t work out, and unable to change that. The antagonist of this movie isn’t a person, it’s the deep melancholy of the passage of time. How it changes us as people, and no matter how much we may gaze back at it, reminiscing on what was, we can’t alter it. Even the setting expresses this. Rather than the vast sandbox that was Vienna in the first film, which was shown to be this almost completely different reality frozen in time, we’re in Paris. In Before Sunrise, we get completely lost in this transcendent experience, forgetting that our time there is limited. This film has the constant, lingering threat of time hanging over the character. They’re constantly asking about and checking the time, completely and utterly paranoid about letting this thing slip through their fingers once more. Terrified of abandoning the chances of ever meeting again. They don’t want to waste more time. Contemplating what could’ve been. Celine’s car meltdown is heartbreaking in the most obscenely authentic way, played wonderfully by Julie Delpy, and it all leads up to one of the most cathartic ways possible to put this to a close. We always hope for it to work, for it pan out. And whilst it’s easy to be nihilistic, and believe that it won’t, it makes it so much more satisfying when it does.