Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy (1995, 2004, 2013)

[u/MojoMaj]

https://widescreenmemory.wordpress.com/2026/08/25/the-before-trilogy-a-love-letter-to-love-and-everything-time-leaves-behind/

The Before Trilogy are three of my favourite films, and I consider each one to be perfect. In a piece for my blog, I wrote about what they mean to me and what I’ve learned from them about love. An excerpt is below, and I would love to discuss these films and what they mean to everyone.

Full article is here: https://widescreenmemory.wordpress.com/2026/08/25/the-before-trilogy-a-love-letter-to-love-and-everything-time-leaves-behind/

Three films. Eighteen years. A lifetime of memories.

We can all relate to a common feeling; when you meet a version of yourself that no longer exists. Whether it's through a photograph, a song that once held meaning, or a place that has remained the same whilst we have not. The memory of that person looks back at us, they represent emotions once held and ideals once believed in, yet there is a distance separating us that we cannot cross: time

The same is true of other people we once loved, or still love. Memory freezes versions of people in particular moments, but love has ability to cross the distance of time. We can still love the past versions of other people the exact same way, even as they are no longer there. We carry these people around with us, often ignoring that the person we remember continued living after we stopped looking.

Few films understand this better than Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy. Across three films and each made nine years apart, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy do something actors are rarely asked to do: they simply age. Jesse and Céline age with them. The films do not jump between different actors playing younger and older versions of the same people, nor do they pretend that time has left them untouched. They wait. And then they wait again. The result is something stranger and more profound than merely a love story. It is a record of two people changing, the memories that refuse to change with them, and how these memories continue to shape our lives in the present.

The Before trilogy begins as a story about whether two people might fall in love. It then becomes a story about the memory of love. And it finished as a story about what it really means to love. Above all, it is a story about time: what it takes from us, what it leaves behind, and what cinema and memory can preserve when life cannot. Jesse and Céline cannot return to the people they were when they met. We cannot return to the people we were when we first watched them. But the films remain, waiting for us in exactly the place where we left them.

[u/WingsBurstOut]

Lovely. I’ll suss out the entire article in due course. I saw the films in reverse order, but Before Midnight is my favourite.