We’re dogsitting at the moment, which has meant a glorious new habit of going for walks a few times a day, often with my children.
Yesterday, my daughter was away and so my nine-year-old son and I took the dog out, just the two of us.
We were talking about our plans to finally watch The Fellowship of the Ring that evening, which led to him asking about my favourite movies.
The Lord of the Rings is right up near the top for me.
But my all-time favourite is another three-film series.
The Before trilogy — Richard Linklater’s three films, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight — are not just at the top of my favourite movies list, they’re also foundational documents of my understanding of life and how it operates.
And they’re absolutely not the kind of thing that nine-year-olds are into.
Walking and talking.
If you’re not familiar with the films, here’s a very brief primer:
Before Sunrise, released in January 1995, is about a man (Jesse, an American played by Ethan Hawke) and a woman (Celine, a Frenchwoman played by Julie Delpy), both in their early 20s, who meet on a Eurail train headed to Vienna.
They start talking, and he convinces her to get off the train with him and walk around Vienna for the night. He’s flying home to Texas the next morning.
That’s the whole film. They walk. They talk. They connect and fall for each other, but — this being the mid-’90s — they don’t have cell phones or social media, and so when they leave one another without exchanging phone numbers, they have no way of staying in touch, beyond a promise to meet again six months later at the place where they part.
The next two films, Before Sunset and Before Midnight, take place at nine-year intervals following the first one, and each features the same two characters in other European locales (first Paris, then the Pelopponese region of Greece).
If you haven’t seen them, I don’t want to say much more than that about exactly what happens.
Suffice it to say, for a kid who loves YouTube, Minecraft, and memes, these are not exactly appointment viewing.
So much drama.
Indeed, when I started to explain the first movie and why I love it to my son on our walk, his response was, “the fact that these are your favourite movies is proof that you’re old.”
But as I explained the plot and what happens to the characters, he changed his tune.
“So much drama! I need to see these.”
It’ll probably be nine more years of his life before he’s old enough to watch these films, or to genuinely enjoy them.
But it was gratifying to see that he understood the human experiences that the trilogy depicts.
Life and time.
I realized that, while I was telling him about some movies I like, I was also explaining a lot of what I’ve come to understand about life.
How we start off young and in beautifully naive connection with things.
Feeling deeply soaked in the world and its stunning nowness — so easy to be connected to places and people and events.
Everything is possible, and one profound moment needn’t be clung to because there are thousands more on the way.
That’s how I experienced the first part of my life.
A constant rush of intense feelings. Everything imbued with beauty that seemed endless and unlikely to run out.
Uncovering scarcity.
But then time passes and you discover that those powerful moments you had while young — a profound night walking around Vienna with someone, for instance — were in fact very rare indeed, and not easily forgotten.
Adult life asserts itself, with its compromises and its disappointments.
It’s not that love and beauty are no longer attainable, just that they are not the perfectly renewable resource you thought they were. And if you’re not careful, you might give up on them without even knowing you’ve done it.
What Before Sunset does so brilliantly is show how those dreams can be all but abandoned, but also how they can be reclaimed if we’re willing to take the chance.
The film’s working title was If Not Now, and those are the stakes of the story: will you give up on your romantic dreams and the version of you that dreamt them, or will you take the risk, right now, of reclaiming them, even if means blowing up your life (and possibly missing a flight)?
Facing reality.
And then, nine years on, Before Midnight shows another part of life.
The part where practical realities have asserted themselves regardless of your commitment to romance and meaning. And while you’re still you — with all your naive romanticism intact — you have bigger responsibilities now, and must live for more than just yourself.
The delicious pleasure of connecting with someone while young; the delicious pain of losing that connection and possibly regaining it; and then… the middle.
There are children to care for. Careers to foster. People you love start dying. Your family is scattered across the globe.
And all of the spontaneous simplicity of romance — I like you; you like me; here we are — has shattered into a thousand difficult and sharp pieces, which may not fit together again the way you hoped.
What does love look like then? How might it survive?
The rain came.
Although he is not a middle-aged person, my son could understand these characters’ struggles, and how dramatic they truly are. It felt as if I had conveyed at least a taste of my own perspective and experience to him, which was magical in itself.
And then our walk was interrupted by a sudden, intense burst of rainfall.
We ran for shelter, and then ran home.
Later that night, we watched the first film of the trilogy (The Lord of the Rings, of course, not Before — he’s still only nine).
And I realized that I will remember yesterday for the rest of my life.
Walking with one of the great loves of my life, in the city where we live.
Talking about what matters most to me, and sharing what I’ve learned about life.
Revisiting, in the evening, another fictional world that forms a critical part of my understanding of the human condition.
My life is not a movie (or even a trilogy). But it is a story I inhabit alongside an entertaining cast of characters. I’m grateful that I got the chance to add one more scene.
Catch you dreams before they slip away… these are the moments to savour and hold in you heart