What a movie Before Sunset could have been if only Before Sunrise had never existed. Calling Linklater’s latest a masterpiece still feels pretty comfortable, but imagine for a second the implications of Before Sunset as a standalone piece. Imagine a filmmaker who brings two actors in the flush of their early twenties to Vienna in 1994 and asks them to play out for his camera the quintessential one night stand: two strangers from different countries meet on a train, tour Vienna, and fall in love, all in the span of 14 or so hours. A chance accident ruins their planned meeting six months later, and they never meet again. It’s an experience so monumental that the memory of this brief time emotionally cripples their characters (call them Jesse and Céline) for the rest of their lives. Imagine that all along, these two actors and their director know that they’re only creating this Viennese encounter to collect a brief few frames for use in another film, to be set in Paris, but not to be made until all parties involved are nearly a decade older. This film is to be a document, in brief, of the fallout from that long ago night, and the quick flashes of boundlessly enthusiastic youth they’re capturing are planned as harrowing counterpoint to images of these two people in 2004, both of whom carry only a faint glimmer of those earlier selves. The juxtapositions are intended to hit with the force of a jackhammer (and succeed). The changes wrought on faces by those ten years are mere opening volley for the even more striking changes in outlook that unspool during the film’s 80 real-time minutes, where each second hangs heavy with the weight of palpable sadness. The force of those few frames excavated for use in the present casts a shadow over the entirety of Before Sunset, rendering this filmmaker’s radical experiment in time, carried out with Kubrickian obsession over a ten-year span, and executed in the “real” wholly successful.

Of course, Before Sunrise does exist, sullying somewhat my vision of pristine laboratory-like experimentalism, but not by much. It’s nearly impossible to grapple with Before Sunset without considering its younger half, but regardless of your feelings towards either film individually, the diptych they create represents a unit almost without precedent in cinema (for reality-based versions, check out Robb Moss’s 2003 documentary The Same River Twice which captures these life-time changes with similar wistfulness, and Michael Apted’s -Up films). For all its lush, on the sleeve romanticism, Before Sunrise left me mostly cold, in large part due to my dislike of Ethan Hawke’s performance and my suspicion of extended conversation in which idealistic youths prattle on at length about the “big themes.” Somehow, listening to Jesse and Céline from 1994 talk about what could be didn’t affect me nearly as much as their older selves reminiscing over what had and, could have been, which might say more about the person writing this than it does either of the films. Before Sunrise felt too eager to please, too date-ready (read Erik Syngle’s piece elsewhere in the issue), and for all that its artful conception allows it to transcend, the whole enterprise feels fairly minor. Before Sunset manages the neat trick of being an anti-date movie (it’s all about getting old, folks) wholly suffused with an honest romanticism sorely lacking in contemporary cinema. A bittersweet mixture of love and mortality, each smile or laugh it earns from the audience is hard won. And can we even guess if the ending is happy or sad or both? Perhaps it’s this indeterminacy that makes me love the sequel to a movie I found disposable. Where I can explain what Before Sunrise is, to capture the essence of Before Sunset is impossible—in the mere act of observing, of trying to quantify, the observed object shifts, moves, floats, transforms into something else. Examine more intently, and it only becomes even harder to pin down. Look from another vantage point and you’re likely to see something completely different, yet equally valid. Perhaps the less actually said about it the better.