Everyday Life With Hannah

Before Sunrise follows two passengers who meet on a train. Jesse, an American travelling around Europe, and Celine, who is travelling back to Paris. A German couple is arguing in their carriage, prompts Celine to move to a seat across from Jesse. This encounter leads to them talking throughout their train journey. Most of their deep conversations happen while they are on some kind of transport, ‘The film’s protagonists deep in conversation while seated on a mode of transport.’¹ The film continuously places Jesse and Celine in motion, the train, trams, and even walking around Vienna, using this restlessness, Linklater creates a metaphor for time itself. The transport carries them forward even if they are unaware of it, and it is precisely when they lose themselves in conversation that their remaining hours slip away from them.

While on the train, Jesse floats the idea of a TV show, ‘documents of real time,’ that would last 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, each episode shadowing a different person from a different city.² He finds the ordinary romantic, even poetic, while Celine dismisses it as mundane. The irony, of course, is that we, as viewers, are doing exactly what Jesse describes, following two people through an unremarkable stretch of time. What they are doing seems ordinary, which sharpens the irony. Jesse romanticises the documentation of strangers, but never stops to think that he is living through one. Jesse’s idea celebrates the beauty of time passing, yet he and Celine are desperate to hold theirs still.

Aaron Cutler argues that ‘time poses as a threat throughout the Before films, not just in the form of physical departure, but through the possibility that someday the people will stop believing in their love for each other.’³ To some extent, I agree, however, the trilogy is not just about the consequences of time but how the protagonists grew and changed with it. At the start of Before Sunset, Jesse is being interviewed about the book he wrote about his night in Vienna with Celine. The book itself is a preservation of their time together in an act to revisit and freeze those moments as they are. Jesse says, ‘Happiness is within the doing,’ which in itself is not true for him. ⁴ He delivers the statement with confidence that he has coached within himself to be his personal philosophy. Linklater frames this with a quiet irony; Jesse is answering the same questions on his book tour, an experience he has grown out of. If he had truly meant that happiness was within the doing, he would have found it because the only time he seems happy is when he is just existing beside Celine. It implies that the happiness was never in the doing, it was Celine. She represents a specific time in their life that they shared. His philosophy was never true, it was just an excuse for Jesse, for his own regrets.

Before Sunrise encapsulates time and encounters more perfectly than the other films in the trilogy. It is seen when their time is almost up, and Jesse quotes W.H. Auden’s poem As I Walked Out One Evening, ‘you cannot conquer time.’⁵ It is a devastating choice to quote it. Auden’s poem is a play on the impossibility of love outrunning time. What makes this so important is that Jesse, who has spent the entire film theorising, finally comes to something he cannot argue his way out of: time. By putting Auden into the dialogue, Linklater elevates the film above a simple romance to an exploration of time and how we as humans choose to spend and deny it.

1. James McDowell, ‘To Be in the Moment: On (Almost) Not Noticing Time Passing in Before Sunrise,’ in The Long Take: Critical Approaches, ed. John Gibbs, Douglas Pye,(Palgrave McMillan, 2017), P150. ↩︎
2. Before sunrise, dir. Richard Linklater, (Columbia Pictures, 1995), 00.08.42. ↩︎
3. Aaron Cutler, ‘Love in Time: Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke, and Richard Linklater’s “Before” Films,’ Cineaste, 38.4, (Fall, 2013), P24. ↩︎
4. Before Sunset, dir. Richard Linklater, (Columbia Pictures, 2004) 00.07.40. ↩︎
5. Before sunrise, dir. Richard Linklater, (Columbia Pictures, 1995) 01.30.48 ↩︎