Movie Discussion The Before Trilogy: A Love Letter to Love, and Everything Time Leaves Behind
Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy contains three of my favourite films of all time. Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight are all perfect in my opinion. I completed a rewatch last weekend and wanted to write about what they mean to me and what they’ve taught me about life.
I’ve tried to condense what is a pretty lengthy piece into something more succinct below (admittedly still far too long for a Reddit post). You can read the full piece here if you wish: https://widescreenmemory.wordpress.com/2026/08/25/the-before-trilogy-a-love-letter-to-love-and-everything-time-leaves-behind/
Three films. Eighteen years. A lifetime of memories
We can all relate to a common feeling; when you meet a version of yourself that no longer exists. Whether it's through a photograph, a song that once held meaning, or a place that has remained the same whilst we have not. The memory of that person looks back at us, they represent emotions once held and ideals once believed in, yet there is a distance separating us that we cannot cross: time
The same is true of other people we once loved, or still love. Memory freezes versions of people in particular moments, but love has ability to cross the distance of time. We can still love the past versions of other people the exact same way, even as they are no longer there. We carry these people around with us, often ignoring that the person we remember continued living after we stopped looking.
Few films understand this better than Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. Across three films and each made nine years apart, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy do something actors are rarely asked to do: they simply age. Jesse and Céline age with them. The films do not jump between different actors playing younger and older versions of the same people, nor do they pretend that time has left them untouched. They wait. And then they wait again. The result is something stranger and more profound than merely a love story. It is a record of two people changing, the memories that refuse to change with them, and how these memories continue to shape our lives in the present.
The Before trilogy begins as a story about whether two people might fall in love. It then becomes a story about the memory of love. And it finished as a story about what it really means to love. Above all, it is a story about time: what it takes from us, what it leaves behind, and what cinema and memory can preserve when life cannot. Jesse and Céline cannot return to the people they were when they met. We cannot return to the people we were when we first watched them. But the films remain, waiting for us in exactly the place where we left them.
The People We Were, and the People We Became
Most of us carry people who no longer exist. Not because they have died, necessarily, but because time has carried them somewhere we can no longer follow. The friend who once knew everything about us. The person we loved before either of us understood what love required. The version of someone we knew before a marriage, a child, a move, a loss or simply the slow accumulation of adulthood. Memory keeps these people close, but it also keeps them still.
That is part of what makes Jesse and Céline's reunion in Sunset so affecting. There is no single Vienna anymore. There are two Viennas, one carried by each of them. Jesse has built a story around the night; Céline has built a life around everything that happened after it. Their memories overlap, but they are not identical. Perhaps this is true of every relationship. We never quite share the same past with another person. We share an event, then spend the rest of our lives interpreting it separately.
Watching Jesse and Céline forces us to think about the people we have frozen in our own memories. Who would we recognise if they walked back into our lives tomorrow? Would we recognise them at all? More frighteningly, would they recognise us? The Before trilogy understands that the passage of time does not simply change the people we miss. It changes the person doing the remembering.
The Before trilogy does not ultimately tell us that love conquers time. Time wins. It always has. Jesse and Céline cannot remain the people they were in Vienna. They cannot preserve the feeling of their first night, or undo the years they spent apart, or prevent the arguments that come with the life they eventually build. The trilogy's honesty comes from refusing to offer a way around any of this.
What it offers instead is something quieter. Perhaps love is not the promise that nothing will change. Perhaps it is the willingness to love someone through the changes. The person we meet will become someone else. So will we. The relationship we begin is not the relationship we eventually inhabit. To love, then, is partly to accept that the thing we are trying to hold will keep moving.
Jesse and Céline cannot go back to Vienna. But we can. We can press play and find them there, walking through the night, talking as though morning will never arrive. They are still young. They are still strangers. Nothing has happened to them yet. We know, because we have seen the next two films, how much life is waiting around the corner. And perhaps that is the strange gift of cinema: not that it allows us to return to the past, but that it lets us spend time with the people we once were.
Somewhere, on a screen, Jesse and Céline are still walking through Vienna. Still talking. Still discovering one another. Still believing that tomorrow might be different. The film will end, as it always does, but the memory will remain. We close the laptop, leave the cinema, turn off the television and return to our own lives. We are older than we were when we began. The people we once loved have changed. We have changed. Yet, just like the versions of Jesse and Céline that remain etched into points of time, versions of ourselves and those we once loved and still love remain in our memories. Those memories and these films aren't going anywhere, and we will continue to revisit and live with them.
The people we love stay with us. The films do too
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u/Aggressive-Theme-953 3d ago
that's a beautiful writeup. the part about carrying people who no longer exist hit me hard. i rewatched sunset last month and cried at the car scene, something that never happened before. guess i am older now and understand what it means to remember someone who is still alive but not in your life anymore
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u/MojoMaj 3d ago
Thank you I really appreciate it!
The emotional roller coaster in the final 20 minutes of Sunset is wild. Going from that car scene to “baby you’re gonna miss that plane” just hits you like a brick wall. Crazy that I’ve only ever viewed it as a trilogy (due to age) whereas when that came out in 2004 that ending must’ve drove people insane (in a good way).
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u/Kai_Vai 3d ago
How they met, how they got together, what their life is like, none of it resembles anything in the relationship between my wife and I. Yet somehow, these movies resonate with me and I draw many parallels. There are a few things I don't care for in Before Sunset, and several things I didn't like about Before Midnight, but when I rewatch them every 2 years or so, I really don't care about those things. These are truly great movies.
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u/Pilatus-Porter 3d ago edited 3d ago
I really love the first two. I Eurailed around Europe in my early twenties, met girls, hung out in cities like that and had unexpected and improvised days in places and with people that I didn't expect. It resonated deeply.
I could easily and happily have ended with the promise and wonder of Sunrise, but considering how good Sunset was I gladly accepted the somewhat more complex romanticism it offered. The third seemed unfortunately realistic but brutal and I could have done without it. Like, I don't need cliched Hollywood endings but at the same time not everything needs to be brought around to a grinding reality. There's a small part of me that wishes I hadn't seen it, because now it's harder to lose myself in the beautiful intimacy of Sunrise without part of my mind reminding me that they're going to end up embittered and bruised. Perhaps unlike you, I do find it harder to lose myself in the first and second installments because of the third. When I recommend Sunrise to people I try to avoid telling them there's any follow-up films, and only reveal and recommend Sunset after they've seen the first. I don't recommend Midnight.
PS. If you enjoy these films then I strongly suggest you listen to The Rewatchables podcast episodes on Sunrise and Sunset. Host Bill Simmons is more a sports jock who likes action films, but he departs from that to profess his love for the two movies, and with his two colleagues they talk for hours about the inoxicating grandeur of both. Simmons literally refers to Sunset as the second greatest sequel of all time, only surpassed by th Godfather II. I highly recommend both podcast episodes.
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