Here’s something I really dig about Letterboxd, especially as someone who ponied up the money to subscribe as a patron this year for the first time: when you fall into little holes of movie review niches, it never lets you forget them.

Earlier this year, I watched three Rocky movies, and ever since then, my Letterboxd statistics have not missed an opportunity to remind me that my most watched director was Sylvester Stallone and my most watched actor was Burt Young (thanks to his also appearing in Chinatown, which I watched for the Reels Of Cinema podcast).

Well recently, I upended both of those then-reigning champions by going on something of a Richard Linklater spree, though at least part of that was unintentional. You see, I had no idea that Linklater directed Dazed And Confused, which I watched appropriately enough on April 20th. And a quick note? D&C was not necessarily for me. I’m kind of notoriously not a stoner by any means, and pot humor has to be really clever to land with me. I thought Dazed was kind of unfocused and meandering. But that’s not what we are here to discuss!

What was completely on purpose on my end was watching what is called the Before Trilogy: Linklater’s three efforts sequentially known as Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. I was perusing the ever-reliable Tubi when I saw Before Sunrise and Before Sunset sitting right there for the taking. I’d long since heard how good this series was, and I had wanted to watch it for some time at this point, so I gobbled them up.

Before Midnight was a bit trickier to get my hands on, as the finale to this series was NOT on Tubi. Or streaming free anywhere for that matter! But it was just $1.99 to purchase on Amazon Prime (and that was the price to own, not just rent, if I recall correctly), and that was an easy financial decision to make to round out the mini-franchise.

The Before trilogy is three movies, each set and released nine years apart, with Sunrise being a 1995 film, Sunset having come out in 2004, and Midnight wrapping it up (so far) in 2013. As a collection, it tells the story of two star-crossed individuals, Jesse and Celine.

In Sunrise, the two twenty-somethings meet on a train in Vienna, and, due to happenstance, end up talking quite a bit before Jesse’s stop arrives. Feeling a connection to Celine, he implores her to exit the train with him and spend the rest of the night walking the city together. She agrees, and the two spend the film growing closer before Jesse has to fly home the next day.

Sunset sees the pair reunited in France when Jesse is on a tour promoting the book he wrote about their night together nearly a decade before. They discuss their lives to the then-current moment and reconnect for a short day before, again, Jesse has to fly back home to the states.

And in Midnight… well, to discuss any of Midnight would be spoilers for the series, so I’ll just leave that part out for now.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are absolutely incredible as Jesse and Celine, and what’s even better is that they become co-screenwriters for Sunset and Midnight. The pairing has some of the most natural and fluid chemistry I have seen in ages. Across the trilogy, Linklater loves doing extended “oner” shots where it is an unbroken moment of the two walking and talking, and it feels like they belong on screen as a duo.

Additionally, each is strong in their own ways individually; it’s not just the combination of the two of them that works. Delpy’s Celine grows from an adorable dreamy-eyed girl to a powerful and self-righteous woman across the three movies. Hawke has less blatant character change, but he brings his usual stand-out acting to Jesse, and everything he says–even where he is at his cringiest–is entirely believable and makes you feel his vigor.

It’s hard to imagine any two other performers fulfilling the roles of their characters or their behind-the-camera tasks as writers. Hawke and Delpy are perfection.

+ This almost could not have been intentional, but it works out brilliantly anyway. Before Sunrise and Before Sunset eschew typical storytelling and cinematic conventions by not following a three-act format. That said, with the movies all taken together as a whole, the series itself is actually a three-act tale. Sunrise establishes the world the characters live in and who they are, Sunset sets up the stakes and continues the build, then Midnight grants the viewer the core conflict and the movement towards a resolution.

It’s so well-managed, and yet each film works as its own piece of the puzzle. Even if Midnight never got made, Sunrise and Sunset would be a satisfactory duology. But with the final piece, it all comes together as a single story arc.

– I don’t want to get into the spoilers of Before Midnight, so I won’t. And even to explain the premise of Midnight is a spoiler if you are just starting the series. That said, I didn’t love the way Midnight made me feel. It almost sours the hopeful positivity of Before Sunrise and the possibilities established by Before Sunset. It feels negative in the face of such positivity. Midnight is a good movie, but it really changed how I viewed the world of this trilogy and the voices behind it.

– Before Sunset is shorter than the other two by a non-unsubstantial amount of runtime. And it might be the most interesting of the three. I wish they had invested a little more time into Jesse and Celine’s reunion, but it’s the flick that seems to have the most omnipresent ticking clock. And its time strikes far too soon. I wish Sunset had been 15 minutes longer.

OVERALL

What a wonderful trilogy! I will say on a slightly downturned note that I do feel like each effort was SLIGHTLY less than the one that preceded it, with Sunrise being my favorite and Midnight being my least. But it was still, frankly, quite excellent. If you like simple character study movies, you can’t do much better than these three.