Though predominantly set in ‘real time’, Before Sunset opens with a montage of the Paris streets, cafés and quays that Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) will soon haunt during their reunion-the shots work as flash forwards that probably won’t be recognized as such until a second viewing. And in its first narrative sequence, punctuated by brief moments from Before Sunrise, Jesse explains an idea for his second novel, one that will be based on the principle that ‘time is a lie’: an adult male, watching his daughter dance to a pop song, simultaneously lives the moment, not just in his mind but in actuality, of a romantic night when he lost his virginity and watched his girlfriend dance to the same tune.

Linklater subtly drops these clues at the beginning of Before Sunset, which then jumps among disparate places and events within Jesse and Céline’s verbal remembrances even though the vast majority of the film’s action unfolds over approximately 80 ‘naturally’ presented minutes. Before Sunset, then, may be one of the most unlikely Proustian, or possibly Resnaisian-films in recent memory (pardon the pun). In order to understand how perfectly this works, rewatch Before Sunrise after Before Sunset. It’s an unsettling experience: one realizes just how sorrowfully fitting Jesse and Céline’s lives have turned out to be, and how each important development has changed the complexion of the past. In Before Sunrise Jesse convinced Céline to spend the day in Vienna with him by invoking a scenario in which she wonders in her future life, stuck in an unhappy marriage, how things might have turned out had she joined him. Now Jesse is the one with the unhappy marriage (which mimics his own parents’ relationship, to boot): that day in Vienna wasn’t a glimpse into an alternate reality for Céline, but for him. And mentioned several times over the course of Before Sunrise, Céline’s grandmother becomes the overseeing spectre of Before Sunset. Her death prevented Céline from meeting Jesse six months later in Vienna, a fateful occurrence that becomes ironic-and recalls Jesse’s story of seeing, as a young child, his dead grandmother appear in a spray of mist from a sprinkler.

In fact, for films that have been and most likely forever will be unfairly categorized as ‘date movies,’ it is startling to consider how both Before Sunrise and Before Sunset are permeated with death. The former may share some generic conventions with the meet-cute romance, but life’s ephemerality keeps coming up in Jesse and Céline’s conversations, whether it be in Jesse’s story about a friend whose only thought in witnessing the birth of his son was that he would eventually die, the visit to the cemetery in Vienna that Céline remembers from her childhood, or Céline’s consideration of Seurat: ‘the human figures are transitory.’ Jesse and Céline share with other Linklater characters a self-consciousness about existing, constantly aware of the moment’s finitude as well as its fullness.

Before Sunset, however, approaches death in a different manner than its predecessor. Although the characters are nine years older, it’s not death itself that has become more real, but the death of youthful ideals and romance. Is there anything more heartbreaking? Jesse states at one point that he doesn’t think people ever really change, and he’s right to some extent-even he himself has retained the same sarcasm and boyishness over time. But the statement is also a cover. The meeting between Jesse and Céline in Before Sunset is so beautifully awkward because it’s apparent that, ‘outside’ the film, they have been suffocating. Jesse has put aside his honest self in keeping a marriage together for his child’s sake; Céline, while working at a humanitarian organization, shares with him her pessimistic view of the world, a view completely alien to the Céline of Before Sunrise; and romance has, most tragically, been put to bed by both. By the end of the film Linklater makes it clear that these are two profoundly disillusioned people, not because they have come to see that the world is a lie in the intervening years, but because their sensitivity has allowed them to be hurt by the compromises and regrets that shape it.

In Before Sunset’s last reel Linklater brings nine years of Jesse and Céline’s disappointments and failed chances achingly to the surface. Their feelings become known to us, but unknown to each other in two remarkable moments. In the first, as Jesse painfully articulates the dreams he has of Céline, she reaches toward him with her arm, pulling it away in hesitation without him ever noticing. In the second, Jesse smiles in surprise as she hugs him goodbye. She never sees his reaction-one of the gentlest and sweetest that I know of in all of cinema-but we do. These are Before Sunset’s two greatest triumphs over the elements that haunt it: spiritual death and the torment of remembrance of things not just past but maybe forever languishing there. Linklater perfectly captures these expressions of human contact, so fragile in their awkwardness, and transforms them into lasting symbols of impossible love-meant solely for our eyes, and hearts.