I recently watched Before Sunrise and In the Mood for Love in quick succession, the latter for the first time. Having seen In the Mood for Love just the night before and finding Mrs. Chan’s character fascinating, I was thinking a lot about Celine while rewatching Before Sunrise.

Celine and Mrs. Chan seemed to be caught between playing a societal script and a desire to romanticize their lives and exert control. Mrs. Chan wears beautiful dresses just to step outside for noodles; self-assertion in the face of neighborly (and broadly, societal) surveillance. She feels powerless to do anything about her husband cheating on her, so she walks (aesthetically, in slow-motion), dressed in armor-like cheongsams, through confining corridors. Celine decides she likes Jesse the moment she sees him and requires little convincing to go on a Viennese mini-adventure. She jokes that she would have done the same with any man who asked. She’s trying to get off the train, both literally and metaphorically; to inject agency and romance into her comfortable-but-boring life (a frustration she brings up repeatedly), while still rejecting the “French girl summer fling” trope. When parting with Jesse, even though she is distraught at the prospect of never seeing him again, she initially proposes meeting only after 5 (!) years, resisting the role of a besotted young woman to the very last second. The most overt way she expresses her attraction to Jesse is a pretend phone conversation, which is mirrored in the husband-wife role-play between Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow in In The Mood for Love. Both Celine and Mrs. Chan are self-mythologizing, managing scripts, in rebellion against their roles through acts small and big: Mrs. Chan against a culture that says that she shouldn’t be out too late and should be able to keep her husband around and should willingly bow down to fated unhappiness, and Celine against male fantasies and an upbringing that stresses the overriding importance of self-reliance and independence for women. This recurrent, conflicting desire for narrative control is what makes both women (and by extension, both movies) interesting.

The men, on the other hand, are slightly boring and serve largely as foils. Jesse in Before Sunrise especially just seems like an annoying 23-year-old American kid. I suspect he will be more annoying on every subsequent rewatch, as I drift further and further away from being a 23-year-old. Nobody likes you when you’re 23 (except maybe other 23-year-olds). I liked his character a lot more in the sequels, in which he’s significantly older.

Overall, both films are beautiful and deserve watching (and rewatching; I’ve seen the Before trilogy thrice now, once for every decade of my life). Watch them if you’re into character-heavy studies of men and women winding into and out of vulnerability through lots and lots of conversation.