Details by Film
Before Sunrise
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Before Sunset
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Before Midnight
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Before Sunrise
An exquisitely understated ode to the thrill of romantic possibility, the inaugural installment of The Before Trilogy opens with a chance encounter between two solitary young strangers. After they hit it off on a train bound for Vienna, the Paris university student Celine and the scrappy American tourist Jesse impulsively decide to spend a day together before he returns to the U.S. the next morning. As the pair roam the streets of the stately city, Linklater’s tenderly observant gaze captures the uncertainty and intoxication of young love, from the first awkward stirrings of attraction to the hopeful promise that Celine and Jesse make upon their inevitable parting.
Before Sunset
In the breathtaking follow-up to Before Sunrise, Celine tracks down Jesse, now a newly minted author, at the tail end of his book tour in Paris, with only a few hours left before his flight back home to the States. Meeting almost a decade after their short-lived romance in Vienna, the pair find their chemistry rekindled by increasingly candid exchanges about professional setbacks, marital disappointments, and the compromises of adulthood. Impelled by an urgent sense of the transience of human connection, Before Sunset remains Linklater’s most seductive experiment with time’s inexorable passage and the way love can seem to stop it in its tracks.
Before Midnight
The bittersweet conclusion of The Before Trilogy finds Celine and Jesse several years into a relationship and in the midst of a sun-dappled Greek retreat with their twin daughters and a group of friends. The couple soon find their vacation upended, however, by the aggravations of committed monogamy, which have long since supplanted the initial jolt of their mutual seduction. Marked by the emotional depth, piercing wit, and conversational exuberance that Linklater and his actors had honed over two decades of abiding with these characters, Before Midnight grapples with the complexities of long-term intimacy, and asks what becomes of love when it no longer has recourse to past illusions.
Technical Specifications
Supplements
- The Space In Between, a new piece in which Richard Linklater and co-writers Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke discuss the trilogy, moderated by critic Kent Jones
- 3x2, a new conversation between scholars David Johnson and Rob Stone about Linklater's work
- Behind-the-scenes footage from the film's production
- Booklet with an essay on the trilogy by critic Dennis Lim
- Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny, a feature-length 2016 documentary about the director by Louis Black and Karen Bernstein
- Linklater // On Cinema & Time, a video essay by filmmaker ::kogonada
- Behind-the-scenes footage from the film's production
- Audio commentary featuring Richard Linklater and actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke
- After Before, a new documentary by Athina Rachel Tsangari about the movie's production in Greece
- "Love Darkens and Deepens," an episode of the radio program Fresh Air featuring host Terry Gross, Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke