I love Before Sunset as well as the original Before Sunrise, but I’m back in November when Hawke came out and was talking about the possibility of a third film saying:
“I don’t know what we’re going to do but I know the three of us have been talking a lot in the last six months… All three of us have been having similar feelings that we’re ready to revisit those characters. There’s nine years between the first two movies and, if we made the film next summer, it would be nine years again so we’ve really started thinking that would be a good thing to do. We’re going to try write it this year.”
Well, it’s next summer and during the press rounds for The Woman in the Fifth, Hawke tells indieWire, “We’re also doing a follow-up to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, so that will be fun… We’re going to shoot that this summer.” So it sounds like the screenwriting went smoothly.
For those that haven’t seen Before Sunset you may want to leave now, but then again you were unlikely to have even clicked on this headline. Either way, some plot spoiling is about to take place…
When we last left Jesse and Celine, Jesse was married but clearly not happy. He was on a book tour in France and had clearly written a novelization of his brief encounter with Celine nine years prior as seen in Before Sunrise, ending with the question of whether the two would actually get back together a year later. They didn’t.
Jesse is now married with a son. The day he and Celine spend together doesn’t end as it did in the first film, with a departure and a promise, instead it ends in her living room and him seemingly not ready to leave.
Where do they go from here?
As I noted last year, the “ambiguity of Before Sunset‘s finale is why it sticks with us, those questions as to ‘What happens next?’ are why we love it. We begin to fill in the blanks, leading us to the scenario we hope and desire for these two people. Is there reason to ruin that with some sort of finality?”
Oddly enough, like Before Sunrise, Before Sunset ends the same way as the book Jesse wrote and was discussing with a captivated audience at the beginning of the film, each of them giving their interpretation of what they believed happened next. The lovers in the group believed they got together the next year, the cynics believed they never saw each other again. The best part about it was in the not knowing, something Before Sunset tapped into as well as part of a natural progression from the first film to the second. Can it work yet again?
My biggest fear is losing respect for the characters. Where Before Sunset left us was with the possibility Jesse may decided to abandon not only his wife, but his son, a deplorable act if there was one. A romantic would somehow imagine a world where he was able to be with Celine as well as remain a good father, but the magic of both films has just as much to do with the love affair as it does with the setting. Vienna in the first film, Paris in the second. If this sequel must happen I guess I would longingly wish for a black-and-white interpretation of Manhattan as beautiful as Woody Allen’s film of the same name.
An even bigger issue is whether or not they should leave this third film open ended or close the door and tell us what happened. What would you prefer?
I say all of this with one caveat, as soon as this film is screened I will be front and center ready to watch it, fingers crossed Hawke, Delpy and Linklater can recapture the magic. We’ll just have to wait and see.
For now, why not check out the final scene from Before Sunset and relive some of that magic right now.
