Travel Films Week: The One-Night Stand That Wasn’t: ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Before Sunset’s Jesse and Celine

I could easily and happily blame Richard Linklater for making me believe in destiny, fate, kismet, or the idea of a soul mate. When Before Sunrise was released, I was twelve or thirteen. I remember getting it from the video store with my best friend when we had one of our regular sleepovers. I sat there, greasy-and-brace-faced, completely swindled by the words that tumbled out of Ethan Hawke’s crooked mouth. I wondered if any of the boys whose names I drew on my notebooks or the sides of my Converse One-Stars would ever feel the way about me that Ethan Hawke felt about Julie Delpy.

Before Sunrise follows two seemingly idealistic twenty-somethings who meet by chance while abroad. They impulsively decide to spend a day and night together wandering the streets of Vienna and end up falling hard and fast for each other. The film opens on a train with a middle-aged couple quarreling in German. Celine (Julie Delpy), fed up with their arguing, moves seats across from Jesse (Ethan Hawke), and they soon become distracted by each other. Celine tells him that as couples grow older, they lose the ability to hear one another, which is ironic because the movie is nearly non-stop dialogue between Jesse and Celine.

There’s no denying the physical and intellectual chemistry between them. Not wanting the experience to end, Jesse convinces Celine to join him in Vienna by telling her she’ll look back on her life as an older, married woman and regret not taking a chance on him. She agrees. They tell the first people they meet that they’re on their honeymoon, and the further we get into the film and the more they reveal themselves layer by layer to each other, the more believable this becomes. They seem so oddly at ease with each other, it seems so effortless, so meant to be . . . the first time I watched it, I wondered whether they were going to spontaneously get married. Now, given my own experiences with missed connections, what-if’s, and horrendous timing, the romantic in me wants to yell, “Do you think it can get any better than this? What are you waiting for; start your forever now!”

In one adorable scene, Jesse and Celine pretend to call their close friends and describe the experience of meeting each other to them:

Not everything is coming up roses, though. For all the charming scenes involving carnival kisses at sunset, gypsy fortune tellers telling them they are stardust, and street poets composing impromptu verse for them, Celine and Jesse exhibit a fair amount of bitterness and cynicism. It becomes harder to tell who is more jaded. Jesse thinks love is a selfish escape for those who don’t know how to be or can’t be alone. Celine believes everything that we as humans do in life is a way to be loved more, yet she is the one wants to be rational and adult about everything. She’s the one who keeps trying to put the brakes on this thing to keep it from going anywhere. She thinks it’s foolish for them to think they’re going to see each other again and doesn’t want to ruin the magic of the night by allowing it to blossom into a relationship she believes would fizzle and disappoint. She’s totally downplaying her level of emotional investment. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism in which Celine overcompensates and protects herself from possible heartache by appearing as detached as possible. They agree not to project any delusions of a future together, get their goodbyes out of the way so it will be less painful to part in the morning, and toast their “one and only night together.”

Celine reveals she decided to sleep with Jesse when she got off the train with him, but that it would probably be too painful for her, and she doesn’t want to just be some one-night stand. She says she can’t help it, “maybe it’s a female thing.” In another wildly romantic outpouring, Jesse tells Celine if he had the choice of not seeing her again, or marrying her on the spot, he’d marry her, because “People have gotten married for a lot less.” Whether or not we’re willing to admit it to ourselves, as women, some part of us, no matter how small, wants to hear these things and feel this special to someone. Regardless of Jesse’s sincerity, Celine gives in to his gushing sentimentality. They grope and kiss, and the next thing we see is the bluing sky that signifies their time together coming to a close. 

Jesse and Celine scrap the idea that never seeing each other again is the way to play this. They plan to meet in exactly six months at the train station to see if they can pick up with the same intensity with which they left off. The film closes with ghostly daytime shots of all the places that were bustling when they’d visited the night before, with each of them in transit, lost in reflection, looking six months into the future.

Jesse and Celine’s story doesn’t end here or sixth months from that night. Flash forward nine years to 2004’s Before Sunset (which I saw in the theater as a twenty-one year old, and it continued to delude me). Jesse is now a married writer in Paris on the final stop of a book tour promoting his novel about the night he spent with Celine. His readers demand to know whether the characters meet in six months as they’d promised, and as Jesse answers that “time is a lie,” he glances out the window and sees Celine looking in on his reading. Jesse wants to catch up, but, again, there is limited time as he’s got to get to the airport in a matter of hours.

They begin walking the streets of Paris and address the burning question: just what the hell happened at that train station six months later? Celine asks Jesse if he showed, and at first he brushes it off, claiming he didn’t. Yet when she tells him her grandmother’s death prevented her from going, he admits he was there, looking everywhere for her. If only Craigslist’s missed connections was around in the mid-90’s! They discover they lost yet another chance to rekindle their relationship when Celine tells Jesse she lived in New York for several years, minutes away from him. 

Everything boils down to timing and circumstance. Jesse and Celine are both off the market. Jesse is stagnating in a passionless, joyless marriage he endures for the sake of his son. He confesses that he could not stop thinking about Celine leading up to the wedding, and that he thought he actually saw her in New York on the day he got married blocks away, as it turns out, from where she lived. Celine’s boyfriend is conveniently away the majority of the time, which works in her favor because she can’t easily move on or fully replace someone.

It’s clear that neither Jesse nor Celine have moved on and that those mere hours together ruined them for their subsequent lovers. Earlier, Jesse admitted that he wrote the book as a confirmation that he was able to love someone that deeply, that his connection with Celine was honest and real, and that he also wrote it in the hopes that she’d read it and they’d be able to find each other again. He admits he’s haunted by dreams of her rushing past him on a train in an endless loop, or her lying in bed pregnant next to him, and twists the knife a little deeper by telling Celine she will make a great mother someday.

Angered to the point of tears, Celine tells Jesse, “You come to Paris all romantic and married—fuck you!” His book allowed painful memories to rush to the surface, memories she’d worked hard to suppress. She used up her idealism and romanticism that one night, and it robbed her of the ability to open herself up that way again. The let down after their six-month no-show left her cold, numb, and unwilling to put effort into her subsequent relationships. He insists before he leaves that she play him one song she’s written, which she does, a song expressly about their night together:

Perhaps it’s that immediacy that comes with age Jesse and Celine discussed earlier, and the realization that they lost what could have been many happy years together that lead them to give it another shot. The film closes with Celine impersonating Nina Simone, saying, “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane,” Jesse admitting, “I know,” and the slow fade as he watches her dance, knowing he’s home already:

Fortunately (or, maybe unfortunately), the third installment, Before Midnight, is already in theaters and picks up another nine years later with Jesse and Celine married with children of their own: