Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Before Sunset
2004 · Richard Linklater · Before Sunset on Sightlines
He's at a table in the back of a Paris bookshop, taking questions about his novel. The novel is about one night he spent with a girl in Vienna nine years ago. The girl is standing at the edge of the room, listening to him describe her. Everything Before Sunset is about to do is already in that room: the night, the book about the night, and the woman the book is about, who is not the book.
Jesse has been touring Europe with his version of Celine, reading her out loud to strangers. Deleuze has a name for an object like that novel. He calls it a crystal-image: a point where a real thing and its reflection get close enough that you can't say which one you're looking at, and each keeps feeding the other. The book exists because the night happened. Celine is standing in the shop because the book happened. Once they're out on the street, neither of them can mention Vienna without also mentioning a published account of Vienna that one of them wrote and the other has read. Deleuze's finer term for this is crystalline description: a description that composes its object and then quietly takes its place. The night isn't available any more. The book is. That's the ground they have to talk on, and they have about eighty minutes of it.
Then the film starts walking. Linklater and his cinematographer Lee Daniel put the two of them in long unbroken Steadicam takes that keep pace a few feet behind, through a courtyard, a cafe, the streets, a boat on the Seine. The camera behaves like a third person who was invited along and has the tact not to interrupt. Andre Bazin built a theory of realism on shots like these: a cut decides for you, while a sustained shot leaves the world's ambiguity intact and makes the viewer do the looking. Deleuze pushed it further. Following Bergson, he argued that a shot isn't a picture of a moment but a mobile section of duration, a slice of time that is still moving, in which any change inside the frame registers a change in the whole. Here the whole that's changing is how much afternoon is left.
You could call the real-time conceit a stunt. Hitchcock did a version of it in Rope, hiding his cuts behind furniture to prove it could be done, and Linklater's sustained takes descend from that experiment. But the trick is doing different work now. The film's subject is a quantity of time that cannot be extended, so it hands you that quantity at exactly the rate the characters are losing it. There's a flight. Neither of them will say the obvious thing. Nothing available to them resolves the situation, and this is precisely the break Deleuze called the passage from the movement-image to the time-image. The old grammar ran on a circuit: a character perceives a situation and acts, and the action settles it. Here the perceiving is total and mutual, and no act fits it. So they walk. They talk wonderfully about books and politics and their jobs, and none of it advances anything, which is the point. Deleuze called those stretches temps mort, dead time: the everyday held on screen instead of edited away. Almost the whole film is dead time. It's also close to unbearable in its suspense, which tells you how badly the old grammar was underselling what duration alone can carry.
The most radical decision here is one you probably don't notice, because it's an absence. Nine years sit between these two people and Linklater never once cuts to them. No flashback, no dated insert of Vienna, no younger faces. Deleuze had a name for that standard device, the recollection-image: a picture of a former present, filed and fetched on cue. He thought it the weakest way cinema handles the past, because it turns memory into a possession. What he wanted instead were sheets of past, the past as a region you move around inside, whose shape changes depending on where you happen to be standing in it. That's what this afternoon is. Vienna is never retrieved. It's circled, revised, defended, conceded, and it keeps coming out differently depending on which of them is talking and how much of the flight has been spent. The past is never on the screen. It's the thing they're both standing in.
It's also on them. Hawke and Delpy are nine years older than they were in Before Sunrise, and the film spends its entire length on their faces and their walking. Deleuze called this a cinema of the body: attitudes and postures carrying duration directly, with no plot required to announce what has happened to someone. You can read the nine years in how carefully they hold themselves near each other. The dialogue, which the two of them wrote with Linklater to an Oscar nomination, has the layered evasions of people performing composure while falling apart. That performance is what Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, called a gest: a posture that exposes a social relation rather than a private feeling. They're both attached to other people. The correct attitude for this afternoon is old friends catching up. They maintain it, and the maintenance is the drama.
None of it came from nowhere. Rohmer's My Night at Maud's established that articulate erotic negotiation is itself a form of action. Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7 built the real-time clock and the woman walking Paris in continuous present tense. My Dinner with Andre proved a feature can run on two people talking and nothing else. And behind all of them is Journey to Italy, Rossellini's couple drifting through foreign ruins while their marriage surfaces in the landscape, which Deleuze treats as the moment the time-image is born: a traveller who can only look, in a situation no action can repair. Linklater runs that operation through Paris on foot, with a relationship that never happened standing in for one that did.
What he added is the interval. The co-writing method he and his two actors invented on Before Sunrise, performers drafting their own characters' words, becomes something else when you repeat it after nine real years have passed: the actors age into the parts, and the difference is evidence rather than makeup. The sequel, the most cynical form the movies have, turns into a longitudinal instrument. That is Linklater's invention, and the trilogy this film anchors is the proof.
Which is why the ending has to be a cut. The film stops before telling you whether he gets on the plane, and what's withheld isn't in the next room. Deleuze separates a relative out-of-field, the adjacent space you can infer, from an absolute one, where what lies beyond the frame can't be located in space at all. The rest of their lives is out there and nowhere. The last cut opens the film onto it and declines to follow.
Watch it again and watch the clock instead of the couple. Notice how seldom they touch, and how the film keeps inventing reasons to put them in motion, a courtyard, a cafe, a boat, a car, so that the talk never gets to settle and neither do they. The only event in Before Sunset is that time passes and won't stop, which is the one event every other kind of film uses editing to hide. Linklater filmed it head on for eighty minutes, then had the nerve to end before the outcome.
Concepts in play
- the time-image — Eighty minutes in which perception is total and mutual and no available act resolves it; they walk, talk and let the flight approach rather than deciding anything.
- dead time (temps mort) — The near-real-time structure holds the ordinary duration of an afternoon, gardens to cafe to bateau-mouche, where nothing advances the action and the film keeps running anyway.
- sheets of past (order of time) — Nine years of shared history handled entirely inside one present-tense conversation, with no flashback or dated insert of Vienna; the past is circled and revised as they walk instead of retrieved as an image.
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Jesse's novel about the night in Vienna: the book exists because the night happened, and Celine appears at the Paris reading because the book happened, actual and reflection feeding each other in the same room.
- crystalline description — Jesse has been touring Europe giving readings from his written version of that night, so the published account has taken the place of the night as the thing the two of them can refer to.
- the mobile section (plan) — Lee Daniel's long unbroken Steadicam takes trailing the pair through Paris like a discreet third companion, each take a moving slice of the afternoon that registers how much of it is left.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Hawke and Delpy nine years older, the film given over entirely to their faces and their walking; elapsed time is carried by how carefully they hold themselves near each other.
- the gest — Dialogue with the layered evasions of people performing composure while falling apart: two people in other relationships maintaining the posture of old friends catching up.
- out-of-field (absolute) — The closing exchange and the cut so perfectly timed it feels like held breath: the film ends before revealing whether he leaves, and the withheld outcome sits outside any locatable space.