Before Sunset

by Peter Tonguette

Peter Tonguette was Staff Critic for The Film Journal from 2002 to 2005.  His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Contracampo, and 24fps Magazine.

A magnificent, transcendent moment in modern American movies occurs at an early point in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. The film's two leads, Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke), enter a record store in Vienna. Celine selects an interesting-looking album and they decide to take in a track or two inside the store's listening booth. Following an extreme close-up of Celine placing the needle on the record, Linklater does not cut for the remainder of the scene (a little over a minute) once they enter the booth. The camera is handheld and we view the action from a low angle. Celine is to the left of frame, Jesse to the right. The song we hear is Kath Bloom's "Come Here." It's as though all of the feelings they have been developing for each other burst through as the song plays, yet they share this incredible moment without even looking directly at each other. When Celine looks his way, Jesse averts his eyes, and vice versa. Linklater holds the shot for nearly a minute before cutting into a beautiful montage sequence, with "Come Here" still playing on the soundtrack. In a shot nearly as eloquent as the one which preceded it, Celine and Jesse are seen in a slow tracking shot as they walk around Vienna and marvel at their stunning surroundings. Linklater cuts to perfectly timed insert shots of statues and buildings. As the song nears its conclusion, we see Celine and Jesse rushing to catch a train, followed by a shot of the two inside it, laughing, talking.

The magic of seeing the moment in the listening booth echoed nine years later in Linklater's brilliant sequel to Sunrise, Before Sunset, was palpable. In Before Sunset, Celine and Jesse, having met for the first time in nine years and having spent an afternoon together in Paris, are ascending the stairs to Celine's apartment. Their separation has by this point been delayed several times over and a car is waiting for Jesse (now a published author on tour in Paris) down below to take him to the airport. As in the listening booth scene, Celine and Jesse's eyes look to each other. Their eyes do meet a few times and they don't meet a few times, but the visual correlation between the two moments is made complete by Linklater's visual choices: again, the moment is captured in a single handheld shot containing both figures in the same frame. If the moment in the earlier film was about possibility, here the overriding feeling is one of entrapment, for the characters no longer have the freedom in their lives to act on their desires without obstacles. Jesse is married with a child; Celine is in a relationship and expresses doubt that even meeting Jesse again was a smart thing to do. Linklater's decision not to cut adds to the imprisoning feel.

Linklater relates Sunset to Sunrise usually in subtle visual moves such as the one described above. Very early in the film, he indulges in a few silent flashbacks, which had me initially thinking that the film may have been conceived in the spirit of Francois Truffaut's Love on the Run, the final film about the character Antoine Doinel, for which Truffaut utilized numerous clips from the earlier Doinel films. Although Love on the Run is hardly a shabby model to base your film upon, I think it's ultimately for the best that Linklater didn't go in this direction. Much more provocative and understated is the way that a second moment in the film relates to the same listening booth moment in Sunrise, a similarity that, to the best of my knowledge, has been pointed out by only one other writer on the film, Carey Norris of The Kaleidoscope: during an extended sequence in the back of Jesse's car as Celine and Jesse are talking, arguing, and letting off some steam, Celine reaches out to touch Jesse as he is looking out the car window. She retracts her hand before he is able to turn her direction.

Before Sunset also has a key scene underlined by song. In this case, the scene in question is the film's last. After Celine and Jesse ascend the stairs (and exchange those glances), the two enter her apartment. Jesse asks her for a song. (Earlier in the film, Celine says that she writes and performs music.) After some debate, Celine sits down with her guitar and performs Delpy's own composition, the magical "A Waltz for a Night." Linklater simply cuts between Celine's singing and Jesse's attentive listening. And we know, again through glances and through music, how deeply they still care for each other.

In a fascinating piece on David Gordon Green in the current Film Comment, Kent Jones implores young American filmmakers to look to Linklater as a guide for their careers. That Before Sunset exists at all is a testament to the validity of Jones' comments. Linklater's career since Before Sunrise has taken him down paths far removed from his early Venetian romance, from the poetic dream universe of Waking Life to the painful intimacy of Tape-and even to Hollywood with The Newton Boys and School of Rock. But he always returns to what he cares about and what interests him. Like Celine and Jesse, he cannot will himself to forget about what he loves.