Before Sunrise, Sunset and Midnight Trilogy at Picturehouse at FACT

One of the key cinematic romances of the last few decades, Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy is evocative, wistful and at times crushingly believable as it follows two lovers through the decades. This summer, Picturehouse at FACT presents an opportunity to discover the whole trilogy – all 18 years of it – across one afternoon.

1995’s Before Sunrise stars Ethan Hawke as Jesse, a young American on a train to Vienna, who charms Julie Delpy’s Celine, from France, into spending the day with him. The pair walk and talk, discussing things big and small with zest and a certain youthful naïveté, the breezy conversation barely hiding the fact that they are quickly falling for one another. It’s the kind of brief romance between backpackers that has happened a thousand times, and will happen a thousand times again, and yet Linklater and his performers imbue it with such intensity of feeling that when the pair make rough plans to meet six months later at the end of the film, audiences could barely cope with the cliffhanger.

There was some wait to find out the couple’s romantic fate in 2004’s Before Sunset. Jesse and Celine haven’t seen each other since that day in Vienna nine years earlier when they meet by chance at Jesse’s book signing in Paris. In the interim, they’ve lived lives, earned baggage and obligations, but as they start to talk, they’re drawn together once again. The conversations are more fraught this time, as each has more to lose and more to protect. Before Sunset is perhaps the jewel of the trilogy, as the intense chemistry of the first film is heightened by the greater stakes.

Before Sunset ended on another cliffhanger, and again Linklater and co. made us wait nine years to catch up with Celine and Jesse. Jumping forwards, 2013’s Before Sunset moves the action to the Greek sunshine and the Peloponnese coast (the travelogue element isn’t the central attraction of the Before trilogy, but it’s a definite pull), as the two lovers, now married, flail as they try to work out what they mean to one another. Competing forces work to draw them to different sides of the world, and the film asks whether chemistry is enough to sustain a relationship over time.

Time is of course the central theme of these films. It is used as an artistic tool in the deliberate spacing of production and helps the narrative arc feel more considered as it draws from the lived experience of everybody involved – it helps too that Hawke and Delpy were invited onto the writing team for the latter two films. Linklater would explore similar territory with 2014’s Boyhood which he filmed over twelve years, but the Before films, produced over nearly two decades, remain the director’s most enduring work on the topic.