5 o'clock on the sun.

On re-watching Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, I was struck by their discontinuity. Despite a wealth of superficial commonalities, they are strangers to one another, so much so that I’m tempted to conclude that the creators of the second film either failed to understand the first, or (more plausibly) refused to bring that understanding to bear. They simply picked up the characters, themes, and narrative of the original, but glossed over the spirit animating the body: theirs is a beautiful Frankenstein. In their defence, I should note, of course, that they had the decency to recognize their infidelity. In the opening minutes of Before Sunset, we are offered a mea culpa: Jessie tells an inquisitive woman in the audience that to reveal further details about the course of his romance with Celine “would take the piss out of the whole thing.” Linklater et al. confess, then, to satisfying their curiosity at the expense of the aesthetic integrity of the original.

Why do these films differ so radically, then? Before Sunrise is an exercise in muted magical realism; Before Sunset is entirely devoid of such fantastical elements, attempting even to deny or explain away their presence in the original. The first film self-consciously evokes a world of dreams and otherworldly attractions: its setting is not Vienna, but a liminal space between the real and the imaginary. That much is made clear from the outset, when Jessie and Celine, fresh off the train, are informed by two amateur actors that the museums and galleries are closed, invalidating Jessie’s map of the city as a guide to its treasures. Instead, they are offered a spectacle of the absurd, a theatre-piece about a smoking cow with canine tendencies, chased by an Indian, with politicians and communists thrown in for good measure: the fantastical made flesh (or something near enough). Their first real conversation also deals with the problem of the mundane in various guises. Jessie relates that the weeks spent watching Europe pass by from a train window have given him “ideas that you ordinarily wouldn't have.” Yet his big idea is for a television show that unflinchingly depicts the quotidian per se: “twenty-four hour documents of real time,” “capturing life as it’s lived”, or, in Celine’s words, “all those mundane, boring things everybody has to do every day of their fucking life”. He expresses frustration at the fact that the quotidian isn’t more aesthetic than it is: that a dog sleeping in the sun is beautiful, whereas a man taking money out of an ATM “looks like a complete moron.” Instead of his professed admiration for “the poetry of day to day life”, Celine expresses her frustration at her parents’ repeated attempts to bring her childhood fantasies into closer proximity with reality, a “constant conversion of my fanciful ambition into these practical, money-making ventures.” And this immediately leads Jessie to dress up his childhood as “a magical time”, and to relate the story of seeing his great-grandmother’s apparition in an artificial rainbow.

This attempt to negotiate the boundary between the real and the ideal is central to Before Sunrise. The night they spend is clearly marked as an excursus from “real time”, and references to delusions, angels, and apparitions abound. At the same time, Linklater has described the film as “romance for realists”, and one of the clearest aspects of the film is the attempt by the protagonists to understand their own entanglement in a manner that is shorn of “romantic projections” and untainted by traditional understandings of how love should unfold between two people (“Why does everyone think conflict is so bad?” “Why do you think everybody thinks relationships are supposed to last forever?”). This central element of ambivalence is flagged perhaps most clearly when Jessie attempts to coax Celine off the train. He tells her that if she doesn’t spend the evening with him, then, in some future loveless marriage, he will become a figure in her memory onto which she will project her fantasies and regrets; but by getting off the train, she will see that he is “just as big a loser as he [her imagined husband] is, totally unmotivated, totally boring”. He is at once offering her romantic fantasy and its negation.

What I have always admired most about this film is precisely its attempt to conquer the cinematic representation of love for a generation estranged from the tradition. But it’s misleading to describe that attempt as a push for greater realism: Before Sunrise is clearly sappy fantasy in excelsis. So where is that supposedly revolutionary element? And in what sense could it be described as realistic? It comes in two pieces, I think. On the one hand, there’s the self-consciousness with which this romantic fantasy is constructed and surveyed; on the other, there’s the attempt to construe conversation as the essential romantic activity, the essence of love. Or what do you think?