So of course the big thing with this trilogy is that it happens in realtime: Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke meet up for a night as young twentysomethings in 1995, again as older thirtysomethings in 2004, and then we see them one last time as middle-aged fortysomethings in 2013.

This timeline has particular resonance for me in that I saw the first movie as a kid in college in what must have been 1996, and the second as a thirtyish adult in 2005. And then saw the third just now, as someone in my forties.

So rewatching Before Sunrise is like a double dose of nostalgia. Yeah, there’s what the movie is serving directly, these young kids tooling around Vienna, just being young and having this absolutely intense, aimless romantic night in the way that only young people could. But then the clothes, the music, and the experience of watching the movie all bring me back to my own life, back when I was a (much less cool) young person.

What’s interesting to me on this watch is that the movie seems to be deliberately framed up to be looked back on. When Hawke is trying to convince Delpy to join him at the beginning, he even gives her a little speech about how in ten to twenty years she’ll be married and she’ll think back to the things she didn’t do when she was young, and at multiple times during the movie, they talk about their future selves looking back on this moment. When I watched it back in the day, it didn’t strike me as a nostalgic movie in any way — it was just straightforwardly this ambivalently tragic romantic adventure — but now, I wonder how I could have missed that angle.

Before Sunset, then, is them as adults (though… I’m now old enough that even young thirtysomethings seem young to me, sigh). They’re a little more chill and jaded and self-knowing, more fully formed adults than they were when they met a decade ago. Or so it seems at first, and then as they continue to talk, their barriers come down, and there’s a place inside them that’s every bit as emotional and impulsive as before. And I think this gets at the way that the old people we are always carry around inside the young people we were — the night they had together nine years ago was for both of them one of the most powerful formative experiences of their lives. And so even though they’re now older and more established and at different places in their lives, it pulls so hard on them that they can’t escape its gravity.

An interesting thing in this movie is that there were a number of things the first movie left deliberately ambiguous — did they have sex? did they meet back up in six months? — and this movie needs to canonicalize the answers. Which could easily have been disappointing, as the ambiguity was so much of the point of the first movie; but the answers work, and the movie ultimately works as another romantic movie about these two people walking around a scenic European city (Paris this time).

The third movie, though, oof. I can’t even talk about this one without spoiling the previous two, so let’s throw in a cut here.

Spoilers

So, another nine years have passed, and now we’re living with fortysomethings who have (it turns out) stayed together after the second movie. He got a divorce, they lived for a while in the US, and now they’re living together in Paris, with two kids of their own. And all the stuff they said in the first movies about how they would eventually come to annoy each other if they were to stay together? Well… it’s kinda happening.

They still do clearly love each other, they have some of those great “two souls meeting” type conversations that they had in the earlier films, where they’re laughing and bouncing off of each other as if they belong together perfectly. But… what they want out of life isn’t closely aligned, and both are frustrated with where they are together, and they also have some of the cruelest and most cutting conversations, the kind you can only have with a person you know as deeply as they know each other, where the line between subtext and text is crossed with a freedom that leaves observers only understanding the surface of the argument. Pent-up frustrations and fears bubble up, past actions are dragged up, and it’s just tense and unpleasant.

The movie ends on a place of reconciliation, but it feels fragile and temporary. I get the sense that deep down, Linklater feels like if they make a fourth movie, it’s one where they stay together at the end of this one; I’m skeptical, though, so maybe it’s for the best if they don’t canonize an ending this time around.

I’ve talked a lot about the structure of the series, the way it was made over decades, and honestly that is the most notable thing about it. But it’s also the case that the first movie was well-loved even when there weren’t sequels, and that these are legitimately good movies. Delpy and Hawke have real chemistry, and the movies are filled with these long, ambling walk-and-talk takes that seem so naturalistic and almost improvisational. It would be easy to make movies with this kind of structure that felt sloppy or bland or which just didn’t work in one way or another. But these sparkle.

I have a hard time really making any kind of objective recommendation of this movie. They hit hard for me because of when I watched them; I think if you were coming to them for the first time, they’d still work, but maybe not quite as well. So I guess: Recommended, but ideally you’ll have started watching the trilogy decades ago.