Review by Kim Wilkins University of Oslo

POST-PRINT Review By Kim Wilkins University of Oslo Rob Stone’s Before the End intelligently illustrates—and lays bare—the deep emotional investment in Jesse and Céline’s romantic connection maintained by many fans of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy since the two alighted from a train in Vienna twenty-five years ago. Characteristic of transformative fanfiction, Before the End demonstrates this investment by offering an insightful imagining of Jesse and Céline in our current pandemic moment: the two are geographically separated, connected to one another—and their fanbase—only by the technological affordances of digital communication. Although Stone never addresses why this once-idealised romantic couple is separated—perhaps by inopportune but unintended circumstance, perhaps by design—the video implies a tension between the Before trilogy’s ethos: the attempt at true interpersonal connection and the wounds inflicted and revealed as part of such an asymptotic endeavour. Stone’s use of jump-cuts, freeze frames, and pixilation intrude on the intimate—but distanced—exchange, halting its flow in a manner both isomorphic with the reality of videocalls—ever more present in our current pandemic situation—and visualising the fissures and ruptures endemic to effortful interpersonal understanding. As both a work of, and a comment on, fanfiction, Stone’s use of footage from the TIFF Originals’ Stay-at-Home Cinema series is illuminating. In their respective interviews, Delpy and Hawke are asked to respond to the construction and trajectories of their characters and the role that the Before series plays in fans' lives. Often, at times, these actors are in essence talking about—but, of course, never to— one another, while fans’ comment in the chat sidebar in ways that both conflate and separate character and actor (“Are Céline and Jesse still together?”/“I love you, Ethan Hawke”). Stone’s repurposing of this footage as videocall (represented visually via split screen) is thus multidirectional: it speaks to a willed extension of the trilogy, imagines Hawke and Delpy as Jesse and Céline in a reality shared by their audience, and recognises the distinctly fictional nature of these characters and their relationship. Stone employs Kath Bloom’s ‘Come Here’—a song that scores the iconic record-store scene in Before Sunrise—to poignantly capture the bittersweet nostalgia indicated by the video’s title. As in that sequence, there is no heard dialogue between the famously loquacious couple. Yet, here the music is not what renders the two silent, for it is extradiegetic. As such, unlike the visual track, there are no ruptures to the soundtrack. Thus, instead of reprising that iconic scene, as Stone states, I suggest he has remembered it for us: the moment that love was sparked is laid—untouched— over all the appurtenances of physical distance and dodgy connections. In Before Sunset, Jesse suggests an idea for a novel that takes place in the space of a pop song. Before the End manifests and extends this notion: it warmly depicts genuine but imperfect and incomplete attempts interpersonal connection—between Céline and Jesse, fans and the trilogy, and people per se in a time when such attempts are rendered fraught and yet more vital by physical distancing—not only in the duration of a song, but its reprises and reverberations. .

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