The year’s best romance (and one of the year’s best movies), Before Midnight, is coming to theaters on May 31. So it’s time to get ready by watching (or revisiting) its prequels, Before Sunrise and Before Sunrise.
In 1995’s Before Sunrise, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is an American writer in his early twenties who has been moping around Europe after a breakup. He meets a French woman, Celine (Julie Delpy), on a train and talks her into walking around Vienna with him before his early morning flight back home. They banter and flirt – and sparks fly. As they connect more deeply, each begins to explore whether this can be a real relationship, more than a transtice encounter or a one night stand.
Nine years later, in Before Sunset, Jesse and Celine have another encounter, this time in Paris just before he is again scheduled to fly back to the US. (Before Sunset is only 80 minutes long.)
In the upcoming Before Midnight, it’s been another nine years and Jesse and Celine are 41. To avoid spoilers, I’ll just say that their journeys have reached another stage, which is played out in a Greek coastal resort.
Co-written by director Richard Linklater and with characters developed by stars Hawke and Delpy, the series is deeply affecting because the movies are unusually authentic movie romances. All three stories are constrained by time and set in beautiful European locations. All three are about two intelligent people who are attracted to each other and are connecting deeply. All three stories are unencumbered by the conventions of more superficial romantic comedies; in this series, there are no goofy best friends/roommates, obnoxiously intrusive parents – and no weddings. There are no races to the airport to keep Jesse from leaving.
Most importantly, the filmmakers let the audience figure out what happens next. As in real life, there’s no pat happy ending, and there’s the ambiguity of yet unwritten personal history. At the end of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, we don’t KNOW whether they are going to get together…but they could. And we want them to.
Both Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are available on DVD from Netflix and streaming on VOD from Amazon , iTunes, Vudu and other VOD outlets. Before Sunrise is free with Amazon Prime.