14 Love Stories: The BEFORE Trilogy

Happy February!  We're halfway through the late winter doldrums, and that means its time for candy hearts and movies about young beautiful people trying to score.  Don't give me any of that anti-Valentine's Day crap.  I'm single and even a bit cynical, but I think that just makes it better.  The nice thing about Valentine's is that, being about romantic love, there's a whole genre of films appropriate for holiday viewing; the trick is finding the good ones!  I'll give you a few of my recommendations, 14 to be exact.  I don't know if these are really the "best" romance movies ever, and I few of them I'm sure are not, but I personally love each one.

I only first saw BEFORE SUNRISE a year ago, having found it on a multitude of lists of "best" romantic movies, but since then, having seen its 2004 sequel, and not long after realizing that the third chapter was due for release in Summer 2013, these three films have quickly become some of my all-time favorites.  They're insightful in ways that few other movies even approach, and some of the most honest, soul-bearing human stories I've seen.  I literally cannot recommend them highly enough.

BEFORE SUNRISE  (1995)
BEFORE SUNSET  (2004)
BEFORE SUNRISE  (2013)
Directed by Richard Linklater
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
BEFORE SUNRISE  -Rated R for some strong language.
BEFORE SUNSET  -Rated R for language and sexual references.
BEFORE MIDNIGHT  -Rated R for sexual content/nudity and language.
Availability: Available to rent or purchase from some streaming services and retailers

In the summer of 1994, while passing through Austria on a train, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), a young American man, approaches a young French woman named Celine (Julie Delpy) to make a proposition.  Ten or twenty years down the road, when she's married and middle-aged, wondering what would've happened had she had gone with the "other guy", being Jesse in this scenario, she might regret having never found out.  So she agrees to get off the train in Vienna and spend the night with Jesse, seeing the sights and getting to know each other for that one night before they both must go their separate ways in the early morning.  After a night of strolling through Vienna, speaking of their deepest thoughts and feelings, they realize by morning that they're in love, and plans to never reunite lose their romanticism, so they agree to return in six months.  In their haste, they never exchange contact information, and won't see each other again for nearly a decade.
Nine years after their night in Vienna, Jesse has written a published novel, based on his experience with Celine that night, and the book becomes a bestseller.  Now, he's on a book tour in Europe, promoting the book in a bookshop in Paris, and one of the people who shows up is Celine.  After the book signing has ended, Jesse has a little more than an hour left before he has to board a flight to the next stop on his tour.  Now in their early thirties, each of them have to confront the issues that prevented them from reuniting before then, and the major changes to their lives since they last saw one another, including new relationships and new realizations about early life's hopes and dreams.  As the Parisian sun sets, they decide not to separate this time.
Nine years after the afternoon in Paris, Jesse and Celine live in a common law marriage with twin daughters, and Jesse only occasionally able to spend time with his son from an earlier marriage that ended in divorce.  Now their nearing the end of their vacation in Greece, with Jesse's son having just returned to his mother in America.  Spending the summer at the estate of a Greek writer and mentor of Jesse's on

the Greek Peloponnese peninsula, Jesse and Celine share their different perspectives on their relationship with the Greek family and each couple, Jesse and Celine, a middle-aged Greek couple and young teenage relationship muse on the comparisons and contrasts of their courtships and ongoing love affairs.  Then that night, Jesse and Celine have been granted a night away from the kids to spend at a hotel.  They walk through the landmarks of the small coastal city, talking about where their relationship started and where it's gone since then.  By the time they check into the hotel, the bitterness of failed dreams and the strains on their own individuality and as a unit have boiled into a ferocious argument that nearly tears their relationship asunder.  But even in the pursuit of realism, the hardest betrayals in love may still be mended, if each person is willing.
This hugely ambitious, yet naturally intimate, three-part, 19-years long love story is one of the unqualified best.