Follow TV Tropes

Following

Film / Before Sunset

Go To

Celine: (imitating Nina Simone) Baby, you are going to miss that plane.
Jesse: ... I know.

The second film of the Before Trilogy, Before Sunset (2004) reunited director Richard Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. It saw Hawke and Delpy co-write the screenplay with Linklater. Nine years have passed since the first film, and Jesse has immortalized the experience in a best-selling novel. While in Paris on the final leg of his book tour, he's reunited with Celine after she reads the book and comes to see his appearance at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore. They quickly reconnect, and even though Jesse only has a couple of hours before he needs to catch a flight home, they decide to kill time by wandering around Paris. Much like the previous meeting, their conversations are very philosophical and introspective, and they also take the opportunity to catch up on the last nine years of one another's lives and how they remember and feel about the events of the first film.


Before Sunset contains examples of the following tropes:

  • Based on a True Story:
    • Unconfirmed. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Linklater, and many critics suggested that (much like Linklater in the first film) the two actors put a lot of their own lives into their characters. For example, critics point to Jesse's monologues about his Happy Marriage Charade and compare them to Ethan Hawke's ended marriage to Uma Thurman.
    • In-universe, Jesse is pestered by literary journalists on whether his novel This Time was based on an actual meeting or not.
  • Call-Back: Jesse asks if Celine just "plugs in the name" when singing her waltz, much like he suggested the poet just "plugged in the word" in the first film.
  • Foreshadowing: The opening credits play over a montage of locations that Jesse and Celine will visit during the film, but in reverse order, starting with Celine's apartment and working backwards to Shakespeare & Company.
  • Continuity Nod: Jesse brings up the entire "we're figments of an old lady's Dying Dream" theory they brought up while in bed in Waking Life.
  • Did They or Didn't They?: The movie plays with the somewhat ambiguous Sexy Discretion Shot from the previous film. Jesse insists that they did, while Celine insists that they didn't.
  • Granola Girl: Celine, sort of. She's an environmentalist, but doesn't have the usual perky attributes of a Granola Girl.
  • Happy Ending Override: A variation, due to the realist depiction of the characters and their lives. The romantic side of both characters has almost completely died in the intervening years, so rather than picking up where they left off, Jesse and Celine put up a pretense before revealing that they've completely messed up their love lives and don't know how to get them back on track.
  • Happy Marriage Charade: Jesse confesses to having one of these.
  • Legendary in the Sequel: Again, a variation. Jesse is now a well-known author, and his latest best-selling work is based on the events of Before Sunrise, meaning that Celine has been immortalised in print.
  • Most Writers Are Writers: Jesse has written a novel, This Time, inspired by his time with Celine, and the book has become an American bestseller.
  • Real Time: This film takes place in the hour-and-a-half following Jesse's appearance at the bookstore.
  • Serenade Your Lover: Another variation. Jesse asks to hear one of Celine's songs, and out of the choice of a song about her cat, a song about her ex-boyfriend and "a waltz", he picks the latter. Naturally, it's a song she wrote about Jesse and the events of the first film.
  • Spanner in the Works: After the two of them planned to meet romantically in the same place six months later in Before Sunrise, life got in the way to prevent it; specifically, Celine couldn't show up because her grandmother died.
  • We Could Have Avoided All This: Invoked by both Celine and Jesse: why the fuck didn't they exchange phone numbers, or even their last names? Because they were romantic twits in the first film and figured it would be more romantic, and didn't realize an emergency (like the death of Celine's grandmother) might intervene.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: Celine lets Jesse have it, big time.
    Celine: I was fine, until I read your fucking book! It stirred shit up, you know? It reminded me how genuinely romantic I was, how I had so much hope in things, and now it's like, I don't believe in anything that relates to love. I don't feel things for people anymore. In a way, I put all my romanticism into that one night, and I was never able to feel all this again. Like, somehow this night took things away from me and I expressed them to you, and you took them with you! It made me feel cold, like if love wasn't for me!...

Top