The Greatest Trilogy Ever Told

When I was seventeen, I made the decision to leave home. The how and what of it I wasn’t sure at the time. I just knew I wanted to see the world. I did some mental math. If I live to be seventy-five and I’ve already lived what is going to be eighteen years of my life in and around Savannah, why would I spend anymore time here? That’s twenty-four percent of my life. I’ve always carried that instinct – that mental clock. It can be exhausting, morbid even. However, it can also drive you to some interesting places, people and situations. You are trying to squeeze every ounce of juice from an orange and for some odd reason you are being timed. To lower expectations, I compromised with myself. If I only make it to New York, at least I’m not here and I can live with that.

I fairly quickly found a way to get around the world. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it would get me out of my hometown immediately after I graduated. For a decade straight, I lived overseas and only touched American soil three times in an entire decade. I’ve said all that to truly say this, I’ve spent a lot of time in planes, trains, and automobiles. I’ve spent a lot of time in relationships with foreign women. I’ve fallen in and out of love – sometimes overnight.

In Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight we start with two people that meet for the first time on a train headed to Austria. From that point forward we are allowed to be with Jesse and Celine for about twelve hours of their day. We are invited back in every ten years and Linklater, Hawke and Delpy literally take ten years to make the next film. We are allowed to visit them at different stages of their lives and with each film they become more complex. They carry an exponential amount of emotional depth with each visit. As a person that has experienced some of this myself, I can honestly say the film feels like it’s coming from a real place. It never once feels insincere. This is how people that fall in love in a foreign place and with a person foreign to them actually communicate - fight even.

These films are never trite or cliché and for once it’s a good example of when “show, don’t tell” doesn’t apply. The show is in their body language, a look or how something is said. Hawke and Delpy’s chemistry is phenomenal, Linklater’s camera always where it needs to be. I’m not sure if we will get to visit them again ten years from now, but if we don’t I can live with that. We went places.