Before Sunset: a linguistic deconstruction of love

Sometime during the early 1990s Richard Linklater, made a movie entitled Before Sunrise, that told this story about an American named Jesse and a French girl named Céline, who meet on a train and disembark in Vienna, where they spend the night walking around the city and over the course of one night, and lead to their revealing more about themselves than they normally would, fall in love and make love and the following day vowed to meet again after six months. The film’s ending leaves audience to decide for themselves whether Jesse and Céline will actually meet again in six months –a fine test of a person’s perception of romantic love.

I think this film is worth reviewing since beyond concepts of romance and youthful idealized depictions of love the movie Before Sunset speaks a great deal about the anxieties that I feel are also facing a lot of us who have been quickened by the reality that what is ‘ideal’ and ‘perfect’ are illusive concepts that we may never really be realized in this life. I would like to think that this perhaps is what makes the movie Before Sunset quite remarkable because it strips us of this romantic illusion of relationships that pop culture constantly bombards us with in the media. It shows relationships as complex interactions of people, circumstances and decisions that we have to live with.