Before Sunset was the film I had been looking for my entire life.  Spoilers

If you have read enough of my articles now, perhaps you may have picked up on the fact that I don’t mind a little romance… little being an understatement.

As much of a movie consumer as I am, being in a friend group of engineers in undergrad and having done a master’s degree in business, I am often seen as the movie guy. I can even remember being at a party once in undergrad and the host’s roommate brought a group of people up to me and went:

“This is Aidan, a film prodigy.”

I had talked to this man once about films, and not to an excessive extent. Was I flattered? Of course! But is he trying to say that I’m the next Xavier Dolan, Cooper Raiff, twentysomething guy who somehow got himself in the director’s chair? Because that was unfortunately not my journey.

All that to say: a large portion of my social circle throughout university was around people who were not self-identifying cinephiles. And if they were, it was over the newest Marvel movie or something extremely blockbuster… recycled IP… you get the idea. Like… I remember coming home from VIFF this year after a late screening and when I told my roommate (an engineer) that I had “gone to see a movie” he went:

“Oh, the new Tron?”

As lovely as my roommate was, I had to say:

“No… it was this British movie?”

Cause how the hell am I supposed to explain Pillion to him?

In my circles, I feel like the perception of me as a cinephile is seen on a much grander and more pretentious scale by non-self-identifying cinephiles than people in my more film-broey-film-girlie circles.

As a result, I am often asked:

1. Can you give me movie recs? (I LOVE this question); or
2. What films do you like?

Now, the latter is a tragic one. You wouldn’t believe how heart-wrenching it is to name drop movies like Phantom Thread, The Piano Teacher or The Florida Project and time and time again people don’t know what you’re referring to. Ugh! A whole world of fantastic cinema is flying past these people’s eyes…

So I gotta boil down the question into a question about genre, and… come to think of it… that genre most frequently turns out to be romance.

Romance films are separated into two categories: there’s the ‘chick-flick’ ones that are primarily comedic, they are stylized in quite a (no shade) American way, and they have very straight-forward storylines.

But then there’s the stylistic, pensive, introspective films that don’t follow the romantic comedy conventions. And these romance films are treated differently. For instance: I could watch Serendipity and people will tell me I’m watching a trashy rom-com, but then I put on Past Lives (another film about fate and supernatural bondage to somebody) and suddenly I’m watching tasteful cinema (but Past Lives is one of my favourite movies, this is no shade to it).

Coincidentally, a lot of my all-time favourite movies depend on romance and relationships. There’s Phantom Thread, Past Lives, Matthias & Maxime, The Piano Teacher (arguably NOT romance but it’s still tea), Chungking Express, Marriage Story, The Green Ray, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, In The Mood for Love, Her, Mulholland Drive, The Young Girls of Rochefort, The Apartment, Wall-E… I could go on.

So when someone asks me what kind of films I like, I say romance films.

And then people say which romance?

And I say The Before Trilogy.

And they say what’s that?

AND THE CYCLE REPEATS ITSELF.

Romance films have always resonated with me. I was particularly drawn to them during a very hopeless romantic time of my life (high school)… while I suppose the yearning is still there, I no longer choose to identify with being a hopeless romantic, especially now that I’ve got bigger fish to fry as a one-month-old university graduate.

But admittedly, the breadth of my film knowledge was limited during high school. I didn’t know of a Letterboxd to discover movies. I felt overwhelmed by the international breadth of a Criterion. I had to comb Netflix in hopes of finding something I’d be in the mood for. My criteria was simple:

1. Released in the 90s or 2000s.
2. Characters are young adults (bonus points if they’re in high school or university).
3. It must have the grainy, textured camera look to y2k films that everyone now mourns because they think Netflix originals have washed out the look and appeal to movies completely. I mean, I don’t disagree…

So I’d watch quite a few of them, but they never satisfied the itch I wanted out of these romancey y2k films. The camera look was there, the love interests were there, but the story was boring, the characters were shallow, and the dialogue was cringeworthy.

Eventually, when I fell down the movie watching pipeline and expanded my viewing to all sorts of platforms, countries, languages, directors, and levels of popularity/critical acclaim, I finally, FINALLY, kept seeing logs, mentions, and love for the Before trilogy. I threw on Before Sunrise and I’ve never looked back.

How… HOW! Had I not found it sooner?

Back in 2024, one summery week in Denmark, I coincidentally found out a Vancouver friend was also in Copenhagen. We met up. She began telling me about her trip to Vienna some days before where she matched with a guy on a dating app, met him, and they fell for each other hard and fast. She lamented about hugging him goodbye at the Vienna airport and the tear-shedding grief she had on her flight to Copenhagen…

(Carrie Bradshaw voice) I couldn’t help but wonder… had I seen this film before, and did I not like the ending?

I urged her to watch Before Sunrise, cause that’s basically what she went through. It shattered her into a million pieces (I don’t know if she’s forgiven me). But that’s just the power of that movie!

But, Before Sunrise. Ugh, what a beautiful, delightful, one-of-a-kind movie that really displays the naiveté, spontaneity and optimism you could only see in a lovedrugged 20-something. They feel so… my age.

It’s great, but it ends tragically. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is an American who had a flight to catch and Celine (Julie Delpy) is a French girl who must catch a train back to Paris. It doesn’t make sense to keep the connection going. There’s a mutual agreement to leave the one passionate night they had together as is. But then, nine years later...

Jesse has written a best-selling book about the encounter. On his last leg of the book tour in Paris, he gives an interview, scans the store, and catches Celine watching distantly in the crowd. Immediately, his disrupted train of thought locks you back into the chemistry that felt so alive in Sunrise. With 30 minutes between the bookstore and leaving for the airport, Jesse jumps into grabbing a quick coffee with Celine. Of course, as you do when you see someone you click with, you get so carried away in conversation that you lose all track of time. Compounded with the significance of this reunion, the 30 minute window is not respected, and what transpires is 80 minutes of century-defining cinema.

In recent years, people have realized the power of the podcast and it’s now (in my opinion) the most oversaturated medium of entertainment. People gravitate to podcasts now because the value in long-form and unfiltered conversation has been realized, and what keeps viewers coming back is the chemistry between the hosts. You’ve got Trixie and Katya, the men of Smartless, or my personal obsession, Mary Beth Barone and Benito Skinner of RIDE. In Before Sunset, you could think of it as a podcast episode between two hosts with exhilarating romantic tension and their suppressed yearning messily unraveling while conversing through a sunsetting Paris.

Their conversations (naturally) fill in the gaps of their last nine years of life. These conversations reflect on their lives, their choices, the ways they have changed or remained the exact same. Without giving much of it away, there is this feeling of reassurance in what they talk about; this feeling that the issues and thoughts you’ve had about life, the choices you’ve made, the journey you’ve been on… it’s all reflected in their conversation topics. It makes me feel reassured, despite watching a very intimate and personal conversation between two characters.

Even when you look at story, there is so much yearning that gradually spills out as more time is spent together. The scene where Celine basically crashes out in the taxi over her inability to move on from Jesse while feeling like a failure in her own relationships. I come back to Celine’s lack of remembering that they slept together nine years ago in Vienna, but by the end, she admits to remembering minute details about that night. The way they have their guards up initially, unwilling to showcase the pain and attachment to the memory of what was, and as they both let their guards down through the film, it all spills out.

Every time I watch it, there is always something that tells me exactly what I need to hear. Something feels therapeutic, like a hug. It doesn’t make you feel so alone. And I don’t want to give away more than I already have, but I love the ending. You worry about the way it meanders, but it catches you right before the credits.

Aesthetically, its grainy y2k feel matches exactly what I used to look for as a high schooler. Dialogue wise, it’s refreshing, candid, and mind-blowingly natural. Acting wise, the romantic chemistry is incomparable. It’s experimental and risk-taking; other films that are this dialogue-heavy can end up excruciatingly boring, and while this may not have perfect three-act structure, there is still story! At long last, it definitely digs the hopeless romantic out of my subconscious.. it sets up the hope that THIS is how I meet someone, that THIS is how I connect with them. It keeps the hopeless romantic in me alive and hopeful…

I just can’t think of a movie that can warm your heart more without being cliché or sappy.

It just, is.

It’s my favourite film of the 21st century, and it sure as hell deserves to be considered one of the best.

P.S. This film came out around the time of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thruman’s divorce. Ethan Hawke has writing credits in Before Sunset, so it makes me wonder how much of Jesse’s confessions about his marriage are simply just a mask for what Ethan felt towards Uma…