THE BEFORE TRILOGY

I was 24 years old when on a May afternoon in 2003 I saw a film for the first time that I would mark for the rest of my life, it was at the beginning of my first Blog "Gondolin" when I met the first work of one of my favorite screenwriters and filmmakers, Richard Linklater.

"Before Sunrise", was the first film in a trilogy, for me epic, about God, or as Celine would say of that science "of what is between two people when they try to know each other" because it is in that moment that there is a worry with the other, the generative principle of life on earth.

Love that is more than a feeling, or other reality that we want to associate with it, when the understanding, or the intuition that something bigger is missing, which defines our existence on this "plane", our mission.

At that time when I left adolescence to adulthood, love was passion, it was discovered, leaving my borders to enter a new space, in a reality that is vast and unknown to me.

The film was from 1994, but as an independent production, it had passed me by and then there were years when I didn't have time to see films, but at that time it made perfect sense and it was what I needed.

For me it was a new experience, to be able to leave a conceptual principle that love was projection and experience in the other, to awaken the inner senses.

It was a time when I was not in love, but the film fell in love with me, for its depth, for its truth, that everything can start with a conversation that makes sense to continue for hours because there is dialogue far beyond what is said, one cosmic meeting of souls, where there is humor, harmony, respect and concern, a willingness to care for one another.

The entire sequence of the film is magical because the text is sharp, political, current for the moment, a portrait of a generation, of my generation, while showing us all the places of Vienna in Austria, from the train station to the metro surface, the vinyl record store, the ferry’s wheel, the pier where the beggar creates magic, the bar, the fair, the restaurant where the gypsy reads the fate to Celine, the cemetery, the harpsichord music in the morning and the departure of Celine.

The scene in the discography, when Jesse and Celine, look towards each other in a rhythmic mismatch, because when one looks at the other it deviates, but in which the two are sure of what they are feeling, something bigger, something true, simple and transcendent.

Kath Bloom's music is framed in perfect cinematic photography. Music plays an essential role and Bach's excerpt from the Goldberg Variations makes it divine.

There is a final sense of defeat, as if the moment had been enough and always is, of those loves that happened in a weekend, but remain for a lifetime, and the longing remains.

Eight years later, Jesse is a successful writer and writes the story of that afternoon, there is some way to find Celine again, which ends up happening.

And she was there again in Paris, as if by chance, this "Before Sunset", approaches another phase of love, by the pen of Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy because the script was written in three, the phase of maturity, when we get along he says that half of life has passed and we have lost everything and there is a sense of urgency but also resentment and guilt, which again end up in complicity and truth.

The film portrays Paris, because if Vienna was the passion, Paris had to be maturity, and in that last interview in Paris by writer Jesse, the story has its continuity.

Jesse, the Writer, was promoting the book on a love story between two young people who know each other in Vienna.

The two companions, meet again and their energies are linked and intertwined again, the scorpion Jesse and the Sagittarius Celine, then exchange first words of affection and respect and, as the trust between them increases, the complicity comes again to the form above.

In this 2004 film, there is a relationship between the characters on the screen and the actors in real life, since the characters feed on the personalities of the actors and that is assumed, the script was written in three between the director and the two main actors, Julie Delpy's parents enter the final scene of the film.

The film appears in the middle of a trip, not walking through the city streets in between a train trip, but at an accelerated pace on a trip on the way to the Airport.

And if in the first film of the trilogy, it was Celine who traveled after her grandmother's death to Paris where she would continue her studies at the Sorbonne, now it is Jesse who needs to catch the plane back to the United States.

The two continue to feel deeply that moment in Vienna, as therein Paris, because there is a natural flow between the two; because their communication is perfect; because no moment has passed; because they feel and communicate clearly the conflict ends appear but the tuning of the senses is stronger and complicity prevails, amid the regrets of what was lost in the solitary journey of each one.

The film is an account of how life's responsibilities and burdens keep us from the essential, but it always comes back. We learn that after all, it is not just Jesse, who writes, Celine, who plays and writes too, while fighting for her ideas as an independent woman.

In the end, the two companions, after Jesse missed the plane, stay together because it makes sense with background music by Nina Simone, realizing that everything starts again where it had been interrupted, to the sound of Celine's guitar while playing "a waltz".

Finally, in 2013, Linklater's account ends with the third film “Before Midnight”, and here the director's sense of humor supersedes the previous two chapters, however, perhaps the sharpest film of all the trilogy, because it completes the sense of the story of Jesse and Celine.

Once married, the cycle closes, and the director addresses here the love of marriage, when the two companions, now married with two daughters who resemble their mother in the back seat of the car, on a journey on the way to Greece.

Can Two Writers, two adults who know each other well after eight years of marriage, live together?

The mastery is to accept and understand the madness and fragility of the other, now that they know each other like the back of the hand, it becomes more difficult to escape conflict, confrontation and at the same time, it is through him that they find the path to the initial discovery again, being that of the other, it was always of both, and the final truth that is not in the relationship, but in the distance between them and that can only exist, with the fullness of each of them in themselves.

Perhaps because it is a story about love through human relationships, perhaps because it is about the search for something higher than the ego, which realizes being, this trilogy is for me, a romantic confessor, a masterful work, profound gratitude to Linklater, Hawke, Delpy and everyone who was in this wonderful project, the "Before Trilogy", that travel´s across, what might be, what should or could be, and what is.