Before Sunset, Intimacy, and Proximity
04.08.2026
Suggested listening: A Waltz for a Night — Julie Delpy
As I’ve come to write a lot more fiction and screenplays, I’ve (re)explored the whole notion of writing plot and developing characters; creating scenarios that feel rooted in some experienced reality or some extrapolated one. I’m revisiting Before Sunset after a long spell of experiences and tons of introspection.
It’s hard not to revisit this series and think about my experience with someone I had an experience with which might be comparable to Before Sunset (read: my entry on Past Lives and Before Sunrise for more context). The sequel follows Jesse and Celine ten years later, not having seen or spoken with each other during the entire span. At some point, while attempting to recount whether or not the two slept together, Celine says:
I remember that night better than I do entire years.
There’s something about these intense moments of connection that one experiences throughout the course of their life that perhaps shapes them in some manner or another for the rest of their lives; it’s a sort of depth of intimacy that occurs maybe only in a vacuum, in a context that feels isolated from the standard day-to-day routine. You’re able to lose yourself in those moments. I think about my own memory, just how photographic it all feels despite an alarming scarcity of photos that I had taken. I think I have a single photo of her taken on film, her face obscured by some light leak in the Yashica I had never used before and had purchased days prior in Tokyo.
There was a certain scarcity of real contact while that situation transpired; I can’t bring to mind all of the texts we exchanged (save for some very particular ones), but the real days we spent together and the late night video calls exist in that vacuum of experience, and they continue to be some of my most treasured memories. I think about Jesse in Before Sunset, who ends up in Paris because he’s written a book (fairly autobiographical) about his relationship with Celine, promoting the book in hopes that she’d attend and he’d get to see her again. That hurts, slightly, as it’s also the case that Richard Linklater created Before Sunset as a sort of “message in a bottle” to a woman with whom he had had a similar relationship with; the catch here is unfortunately that she died a year before the film’s release and never got to see it. He sort of reimagines it in Before Sunset, and Jesse does in his book. It’s a different ending.
In some cases, I think I acted in the same sort of way: creating a load of autobiographical work that was not-so-loosely inspired by the time I spent with this person (and, often, I find myself inspired by that relationship, whatever it was).
Celine at some point starts to say more about how the book stirred things up in her, it brought her straight back to the emotions she was feeling in the moment and reminded her of just how miserable the rest of her life feels in comparison. There’s a certain ecstasy in interactions like this, and I’ve often stopped and wondered if I’ll ever feel anything with such intensity ever again, or whether I’m even meant to feel anything like that anymore now that I’m 25 and practically geriatric. I think that feeling incites a desire to return—it leaves one wondering what might’ve happened if things had gone differently, in the same way that Jesse asks Celine to consider what might’ve happened if they did both meet up in Vienna when they said they would.
A writing professor of mine had me do an exercise: she had instructed me to draw the person who stirred up the most “emotional arousal” in me—in other words, the person I had a crush on or was in a relationship with, etc., etc. I tried, it was a horrible, barely distinguishable sketch of a girl with dark hair and pretty eyes and my attempt at a beautiful smile. The whole point of the assignment, though, was to highlight the difficult endeavor to accurately depict something/someone one thinks they know intimately. She mentioned that when one goes to kiss another person, it’s almost impossible to see any details—you can’t study a person’s face from that close. The closer one is, the less one sees. A classic case of missing the forest through the trees!
It’s a confusing notion. I think about it in the context of Before Sunset or my own respective experience, and I wonder what it means in the inverse—how it’s possible to remember everything about a single day. Does that mean we weren’t close? Or is there an intimacy that lives independent of proximity, an intimacy sans intimacy? It makes the film photo ultimately more fitting: an attempt at capturing a moment totally obfuscated, rendering it impossible to capture with utmost detail. Instead what remains is a ghostly rendition of her smiling face.
I think what we experience with the difficulty of conjuring up those images, the notion that kissing is intimate, yes, but it’s not a way to study someone—it’s a different form of intimacy entirely. It’s present in the same way that one needn’t experience anything physical with someone in order to experience an intimate moment.
I write this knowing that she and I are on some strange terms, and so I’ve never been able to ask what she thinks about the whole ordeal. Naturally, like Jesse and Celine, life moves on to some degree, but it’s in moments where one doesn’t expect the feeling to return, the baffling whirlwind of past experiences, that these questions resurface.
Celine says to Jesse:
I feel alive when I want something more than basic survival needs. Wanting, whether it’s intimacy with another person or a pair of shoes, is beautiful.
There is something beautiful about the act of wanting, of longing for something in one’s past. I’m left wrangling the question of whether it was a form of intimacy or an impression of it, whether the emotional connection feels more like a retroactive imposition, a way to cope with the uncertainty of something that didn’t end conclusively. I think it’s possible that the same things that made those moments feel intimate and real are what render them unreachable now, like my sketch that never quite resembled her.
← paul.place