Before Sunset (2004)

[Music] Welcome to Love Factually, the podcast that analyzes rom-coms and romantic films using the science of close relationships, where your host Paul Eastwick and Eli Fingle, Eli, what are we talking about today? Today we're talking about before sunset. The follow-up to before sunrise, Richard Linklater's Indy Talk Fest starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpey. The timeline and the actors have advanced nine years and a whole lot has happened. Some of the themes we'll explore are how we can truly listen to one another, the ambiguity of infidelity, and how we make hard choices in our relationship. And fair warning, we'll be spoiling this movie today and the prequel before sunrise. So if you don't know who showed up at that platform in Vienna nine years earlier, then go ahead and watch this movie and come back. So Eli, who are the key characters and couples in this movie? Before sunset, like before sunrise, has two major characters, Jesse and Saline. They were 23 when they met on that fateful 1994 train trip and explored Vienna as if they were no tomorrow. Nine years later, their older and wiser regrets they have a few. Jesse, the American, is no longer aimless. He's now married with a four-year-old son and he recently published a best-selling novel. In the gentle battles between his optimistic romanticism and his Gen Z cynicism, the romanticism usually comes out on top. Saline, the Parisian, remains an exposed nerve. She's now an environmental activist and she's dating a war photographer who's rarely around. In her own internal struggle, wide-eyed idealism and moral outrage are well-matched combatants. As in the earlier film, a major character in before sunset, albeit not a human one, is time. Which is both a gift from the universe and something of a villain. Once again, Jesse's flight home has a set to purge your time and the ticking clock brings a sense of urgency. So, Paul, those are the chess pieces. Are you ready to give us one minute on how the film moves them across the board? I am ready, count me down. On your mark. Get set, go. Jesse is at his last stop on a book tour in Paris promoting his novel called This Time, based on his brief encounter with Saline nine years earlier. Saline unexpectedly shows up and they decide to spend time together before Jesse's flight. Jesse is now married with the young son and lives in New York and Saline works as an activist. They stroll through Paris, catching up in their lives and reviving their banter about existential questions right where they had left off. As they talk, they gradually reveal more and more details about how they had come to remember their one night together in Vienna. It turns out that Jesse had shown up in Vienna as they had agreed and that Saline had wanted to be there but couldn't because of the death of her grandmother. Jesse reveals he wrote his book hoping Saline would find him that his marriage is cool and disconnected and that he only finds joy in being with his son. Saline worries that she had poured all of her romanticism into that one night and she was never able to feel the same way about anyone else. While this time, it is unclear exactly how long Jesse has before his flight back home. Finally, at Saline's apartment, she invites him upstairs to play a song on the guitar that she had written about him. Then, Saline begins dancing to Nina's songs just in time and playfully tells him doing her best needless more impression. Baby, you are going to miss that plane. I know. Oh my goodness, about 0.08 seconds under time. Yeah. Truly excellent. I was a little nervous about that one. Just had to get that last line in there. So, you know, in terms of my relationship to this movie, a couple of things, one is I'll just say I remember the nine years in between. Interesting. This movie and the next one. There is a third movie before midnight in this sequence. We are not going to spoil it today. We are not going to talk about it. But what I'm trying to do is remember the headspace that I was in during that period of time. Where you know that something is going to happen between these two at the end of the movie. It's an ambiguous ending. It's more than just like, thanks for the tea. I'm going to go catch my flight. But is it going to be in affairs? Is it going to be some like life altering choice we don't totally know? This was meant to be a movie for the romantic, for the cynic and for the hopeful guy in that first scene. And that's really what it felt like in that nine year period. And the other thing that I'll just say is, you know, I find the fork in the road concept to be among the more poignant romantic experiences that a person can have. Not everybody gets those. Are you talking about like between two different people or like, am I ready to commit or not ready to commit or ready to be forced or operated? I mean like, right, right. So I mean like two different people where you, there are these two paths and you have to choose one like right now and you cannot go back. Yeah. And there aren't too many moments in life that are quite that all consuming and explosive. And I'm sure we'll talk about it more in the context of this movie. But the memories I have of the few experiences that fit that description are kind of stored right next to that indelible image of Ethan Hawke sitting on the couch, right, deciding that he was going to miss the plane. You know, it's wild because you know, the thing you flag that second part about, you know, what's your relationship to the movie is very close to what I flagged and there's a he's got this tremendous. It's almost like a monologue. There's some dialogue involved, but they're on the the river, the San River in Paris and he has a lot of just tremendously insightful lines there. And one of the things he says is one of his like most existential comments and he says, yeah, I like that. I've always felt there was some kind of mystical core to the universe. But more recently I started to think that, that me, you know, my personality, whatever that I don't have any permanent place here, you know, in eternity or whatever, you know. And the more I think that, I can't go through life saying that this is no big deal, you know. I mean, this is it. This is actually happening. What do you think is interesting? What do you think is funny? What do you think is important? You know, every day is our last. And the reason why that hits home for me so much is that one of my favorite books, maybe my favorite novel, is The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kunderra. And what does it mean the unbearable lightness? Well, Kunderra is contrasting that with Nietzsche's comment of eternal return, this philosophical idea where every moment is repeated infinitely, making it immensely wady. And then if it only happens once, right? If you only get through this life one time, you have this lightness, but it's kind of unbearable because there's no doovers, right? There's no redoes. And so the stakes associated with the choice that we're making on this one precious life that we have are enormously high and I, I related to that in a significant way. I totally get that. So what does this movie get right about the nature of close relationships? A lot. And I find this movie just like a predecessor to be just really insightful about relationships. So one of the things I found interesting is, is what happens to a marriage or a relationship that's like fine, like there's no conflict or at least not much conflict, but does that make it safe? And here I'm talking about Jesse's relationship with his wife. And when they're on that boat trip, he says about his wife, she's a great teacher, a good mom, she's smart, pretty, you know. And then later in the car, he says about her, I want a great life, I want her to have a great life, she deserves that. And yet he thinks, I don't know, like maybe I don't need that to be forever and it doesn't feel right. And I find this interesting in part because, as you know, I've been interested in the way we think about marriage and how that's changed over time. We're in this self expressive era where it's not really enough that, you know, you feel a tenderness and a love for your partner. You want it to result in your sort of authentic life and your personal growth and he doesn't find that. And what's interesting about that is there is a big literature looking at what leads to break up, what leads to infidelity. And it isn't always conflict. It's not like we're fighting so much in there for break up. In fact, more than half of marriages that end in divorce are non-conflictual marriages. And even if you look at the predictors of things like infidelity, you often find that these aren't necessarily people who are fighting a lot or unhappy. And so the thing that we're seeing with Jesse's marriage is that it's like totally good and it's not conflictual, but it's also not fulfilling his needs in some crucial ways. And it is probably placing him at risk with this interaction he's having with Celine. All right, so this is great. So I want to talk a little bit about what he says. And this is actually part of that same boat discussion about his marriage because I think it is very instructed. I'll talk about how I use this in my class. It's funny like in the moment, I remember thinking that it didn't much matter, the cool of it all. I mean that nobody's going to be everything to you. And that ultimately it's just a simple action of committing yourself. You know, meeting your responsibilities that matters. I mean, what is love, right? If it's not respect, trust, admiration. And I felt all those things. So I'll cut to the present tense and I feel like I'm running a small nursery with somebody I used to think. I mean, I'm like a monk, you know. I mean, I had sex less than 10 times in the last four years. What, what, what, you laughing at me and sounds pathetic? What kind of story do the monk have sex? I'm doing better than most monks, right? But I do, I feel like if somebody were to touch me, you know, I would dissolve into molecules. So when I show that clip in my class, I use it as an illustration of the Sternberg love triangle. Okay, so Sternberg talks about three kinds of love and he has this triangle to sort of depict it. One is passion, one is intimacy. And the third one that I sort of credit him with adding to our understanding of love is this cool commitment component. And that this is a way of loving somebody that is distinct from passion. And intimacy in his point is that, you know, love can have varying degrees of those three things. Okay. So I think this is a nice illustration of what it's like to be in a relationship that is pretty much just that third thing. There is no passion. Does not seem as though there is any intimacy, but there is commitment. There is feeling like you're connected to something bigger. I'm like, you have responsibilities. And I think what is interesting about this movie, vis-a-vis what we understand in the science, is that the science is actually pretty big on commitment is very, very important. It keeps you attached to your current relationship, makes you not want to cheat, makes you very happy in that relationship, makes you want to stay in that relationship. And I think we're seeing here something that personally, I find more realistic than that scientific description I just gave you, which is that for many people, it is not enough. It is not enough to have no passion and no intimacy there. And so this is an interesting tension, I think, between the movie and the research literature. And I'm going to credit the movie here for getting it right. - So totally fascinating. I agree with how you've characterized the literature and how you've characterized the tension that we see with this movie. So what's interesting is he was married to her. Like at the time of this movie, and who knows what's going to happen after this movie, but he arrives in Paris, married. And he's telling this beautiful woman that he has a past with, Celine, that he's framing this story of his marriage in a certain way. But when you say like you think this is more realistic, it's not entirely clear what he's going to end up deciding. And of course, he's still married, right? So the question is, is commitment enough? I mean, I think the answer is so far, it's been enough if the idea is to get him to stay and be committed to her. - I think we see later in the movie that he's pretty darn unhappy, right? That we see him in the car when he says like, there is no joy. Well, we'll talk about this some more later. But I think we are seeing somebody who is profoundly unhappy but is committed. And I think that is a common experience that quite frankly, our science is almost ill-equipped to capture. It is very hard for us to get people to report on questionnaires. Yes, I am deeply committed, but I am very, very unhappy. I think this is a real thing that people experience and it is very hard, but actually our science, it kind of falls down on this point. - Yeah, and the movie seems to suggest, or potentially leads to the hypothesis that commitment is enough to keep you rolling along, but if that's the sort of empty commitment that you have, you're going to be susceptible when somebody else comes along and starts thawing that heart of yours. - Right, right, exactly. And I think that's what we see here. What else do you have about what this movie gets right? - I mean, I get a little abstract here. Like, I love the way they think the movie deals with this issue of what I've called here, the impermanence of sense-making, right? Like, we only have, in terms of our understanding of the world, we only have interpretations. We only have stories that we impose on the reality that we encounter. And this film does a terrific job of displaying how that sense-making process can change over time. There's two examples that I love. One is about the nature of memory. So, Celine at some point says, you know, but, you know what? Now that we've met again, we can change our memory of that December 16th. It no longer has that sad ending of us never seeing each other again, right? And he says, yeah, you're right. I mean, I guess a memory is never finished as long as you're alive. And I love that. This is really true. And it's really cool. And it's related to the second thing that comes up, did they have a one-night stand? So, she, at the end of the movie, is you summarize, she brings them up to her apartment, and she sings him this song that she's written. And it's, you know, the key stanza starts with, let me sing you a waltz about a one-night stand and she goes over that. Of course, there were a one-night stand. They live in the last of one night. It fits the definition. It's the definition. And they never had any realistic hope of seeing each other again. But now it's pretty weird to call this a one-night stand. And so this idea that there's, again, this impermanence of sense-making, that was a one-night stand, and now it isn't. And that was a big fail that we had and a really sad ending of our relationship, but not anymore. And I love that. That is something that's always available to us with new information or with new effort. We can reinterpret the past in ways that have different and often better meaning. - Yeah. Well, on the topic of sense-making, this is also relevant to one of the things I really liked. And this has to do with how we see that Selene has become, I think, more avoidant since we saw her in the first movie. So I want to play a quote here. - Mm-hmm. You know, it's not even that. I was fine until I read your fucking book. It stirred shit up, you know? It reminded me how genuinely romantic I was, how I had so much hope in things. And now it's like, I don't believe in anything that relates to love. I don't feel things for people anymore. In a way, I put all my romanticism into that one night and I was never able to feel all this again. Like, somehow this night took things away from me and I expressed them to you and you took them with you. It made me feel cold, like if love wasn't for me. - I don't believe that. I don't believe that. - Wow, that's powerful monologue. - It is so powerful. - And it's so sad. - Yeah. - And this can happen. So I often credit Chris Frailey with doing some of the best work on things like attachment style change over time. He looks at the kinds of life events that predict whether people are likely to become more or less avoidant. And I think actually one of the key things that he finds in this space is that it really is about the interpretation of the event. So something like a breakup or rejection or the missed connection that they shared could have made somebody more or less avoidance. It really is about how you interpreted that experience and it really seems like she interpreted it in this way that made her afraid, made her worried about opening up to other people in the future for fear of getting hurt. And that is the kind of thing that can lead somebody to become more avoidant. - Yeah, I mean, again, I don't think an accident that they wrote her as being in a relationship with a man who's rarely around. - Right, there you go. - Yeah. - It's exactly right. And I think that that was an excellent depiction of the process of becoming more avoidant over time. - Yeah. You know, one of the other things I really loved about the movie that I think they get right. And again, in ways that are so supple by comparison to a lot of other films that are much more obvious, they have really interesting examples, I think, of what it looks like to be a good listener. And the reason I like these examples is that it's not just that I said a thing and your immediate response was responsive in sort of the hairy reese sense. It's more interesting than that. It's like our conversation is flowing and in the midst of that conversation flowing, you said a thing. And then the next time there was a lull in the conversation or the next time it was relevant, it came up again. And so two examples I wanna mention, the first is sort of midway through the movie. Celine says, sometimes I worry that I'll get to the end of my life feeling, I haven't done all I wanna do. And he's responsive here and he says, well, what do you wanna do? And she says, well, I wanna paint more, I wanna play my guitar every day, I wanna learn Chinese, I wanna write more songs. There's so many things I wanna do and I end up not doing much. And what's cool about that is then a bunch of time passes. And then there's a lull in the conversation and what does Jesse do with it? He says, so what kind of songs do you write? And again, I don't think we've studied this that well. I, you know, in my notes here, I've called this callback listening. - Yeah, it's callbacks. - Callbacks. - Yeah, so she-- - I mean, do this in communication stuff, but we don't do it in relationships as much, I don't think. - Yeah. And then my favorite example is later, so Jesse, this is when things are getting heavy, it's a little bit later in the movie. And he says, I've had sex less than 10 times in the last four years. I feel like if someone were to touch me, you know, I would dissolve into molecules. And then later, they're saying what they think is goodbye. And she says, I wanna try something and he says, what, and she hugs him and says, I wanna see if you say together or if you dissolve into molecules. And he says, how am I doing? And she says, still here, and he said, good, I like being here. And she just did a great job. She encoded what he said. And in the right moment brought it up again. And there is literature on what it takes to be a good listener. People like Guy Itzhekov and Harry Reese have done work on the importance of listening. You need to be paying attention. You need to be demonstrating that you understand. You need to have some positive attention toward your partner. And yet, this idea of the callback, this idea that you've viled it away and have the ability to bring it up again at the right time is something that I don't think we know that well within relationship science and the movie just illustrates it beautifully. I think this movie has a great, so many cool things to say about the intimacy process unfolding in general. And so did the prequel. So when we talked about before sunrise, we talked about how it sort of put the getting to know you processed through a turbocharger. And we talked about the art air in 36 questions and sort of what is it like to peel back the layers of another person and how, you know, showing how that could happen in a compressed period of time. So here, I guess I'd argue like we're seeing it again, but it's not the getting to know you form art air and form of the thing because they kind of know each other. Because they kind of know each other, but there are secrets there. There are things they do not want to touch right away. So they have lies in there, right? At first, he lies about not having gone to Vienna, right? She lies about not remembering that they had sex. And because they're moving cautiously again through that sequence. So when I think about what two people who are just meeting and falling in love, what that intimacy process looks like, I think about the first movie. But when I think about two people who know each other and are going through that intimacy process and falling in love, I imagine something like this. There's still some guardiveness, right? There's still things you're afraid to disclose, but it's a little bit different than the, it's not something that can be solved. I don't think as easily by like, you know, let's talk about death and get to know each other. It's just like, yeah, it feels like more touchy and like there are more raw nerves here. Yeah, in part because it's our personal history together. Yes, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's not just like, am I ashamed of things in my past or do I have some awkward qualities that you might uncover? It's like, how have we treated each other in the past? And that, yeah, for a good reason, can get a little tender. Yeah, for sure. Anything else this movie gets right? I so much, but I'm happy to leave it there and move on to misconceptions. You want to get us started on that one? Yeah, so it's funny because the misconceptions that I have, I'll be honest, these, I'm nitpicking here. This one is fun though because there aren't too many movies that go about citing papers in JPSP, but this one does. The Brickman at all, 1978 lottery winner study. Northwestern University, baby. Yeah, well, sorry to my alma mater and sorry to you, that study doesn't actually hold up in the modern day. So that was the study about lottery winners purportedly quickly returning to their pre-lottary levels of happiness. Now the hedonic treadmill is a thing, that's kind of what this is based on. People often kind of have a set point of happiness. Nevertheless, many more extensive studies have been done since 1978 showing that winning the lottery does have an effect on people's happiness. It does make them a little happier. It's not totally nothing the way that early study thought. I mean, that early study had like 20 people in it. So we can say the movie gets something wrong, but only because it's citing a rather old JPSP that it is of the modern standard. Yeah, but in a sense, it also kind of gets it right. I think that what you mean by kind of quibbling, right? The effects are much less than I think most people would think. If you were not that happy with your life and you won the lottery, that's not going to change everything. You're now suddenly extremely happy. Yeah. Yeah, good point. Good point. What do you have here? One is the movie, at least in moments, seems to lean into this idea that you and I have raised reservations about, which is that compatibility is about finding the right partner. So you recall the clip you played earlier where Jesse's talking about his relationship where he says, "I remember thinking that it didn't much matter the who of it all." The who of it all. And what I think he's implying there is like, "Wow, you can be married to anybody and you could sort of make that work." And then he's clearly saying, "That's wrong." And who knows what the movie is ultimately saying about whether he ends up back with his wife or he leaves his wife for Celine or whatever, some third possibility. But the movie and Jesse seem to believe that was nonsense. That belief that relationships are mostly what you make of it. Not whether you're with the right person. The movie seems to think that's nonsense. And I think that's wrong. At least the evidence that you and I have been able to collect this by suggesting that yes, there's something to be said for finding the right person, but that's not most of it. Most of what makes a relationship good is deciding to make it work with the person you chose. Okay. I would like to try to differentiate between a few different things here that I think will be helpful. So one of the ways we've talked about compatibility before is about the intersection of two people's stable features and that I think you could understand what Ethan August saying is like, it didn't really matter the who of it all. It didn't matter who I was with somebody who fit what I was looking for really or not. Okay. So that is one interpretation of what he's saying. There's another way of thinking about compatibility that you and I often lean into a lot, which is like, hey, people create it. You develop patterns together. You should lean into the good ones, lean away from the bad ones. That's how you build a fulfilling relationship. But some of that compatibility, that's about you and another person specifically, can sort of be discovered or happens through chance or happens through happenstance. And I think he was like hoping that he would be able to create and discover compatibility along the way with his wife. And it kind of turned out that he couldn't. I don't know what he's trying to tell us there is like, I wish I'd like found somebody who was similar to me in all the right ways. I think in some ways what he's saying is like, I took a shot and I got kind of unlucky. Interesting. Yeah. Totally fascinating. One other small thing, I think the movie gets around, but again, I just absolutely feel like I'm nitpicking here. So when Selena admits that she lied about not remembering having sex, she says women pretend things like that. I know. Yeah. Okay. So there is a literature on people's reported number of sex partners and the common gap between men and women when men will say they've had many sex partners, women say they have very few. As this, you find it if you're just asking about heterosexual sex partners, you find that difference. So where does that difference come from? Well for a long time, actually in my classes, I thought it was both men and women, they're estimating badly. Okay. Men are like rounding up and women are rounding down. It turns out there's not it. I went back and I looked at this. No, it's that men use an estimating strategy and women are more likely to have an exact count. So men will do like a 30 kind of thing. And that's where most of the difference is coming from. So when she says women pretend things like that. Actually, most women have a pretty good count. You know, that comment leads me to, if anything, my sort of second quibble with the movie, which is a little bit about, I'm worried that some of the ways that Saline is behaving and thinking are going to make it hard. If these guys are going to have any sort of future together. And one of them is related to gender, this sort of gender essentialism that we saw a lot more of in the first movie, but she's still doing here in the way that you just said. But there's another spot. He's just confided that he's really struggling in his marriage and she says, you know, I'm sorry to hear that, you know, you're not that happy in your marriage. And then there's like a bit of an aside. And then she continues, you know, couples are so confused lately. I think it must be that men need to feel essential and they don't anymore. It's been imprinted in their head for so many years that they have to be the provider. And he just gave like a long emotional story that clearly was not that about the failing of his own marriage. But this was top of mind for her. And I think this was kind of vivid for me because I think she does a bunch of things that are going to be complicated if these two are going to have a future. So I think she does some behaviors that are perilously close to contempt. So she keeps giving them the finger when he's, you know, she's teasing. That's funny though. It's okay. I mean, I'm hoping to grant that these things can be funny, but it felt a little aggressive to me. So I do a bunch of things like that that make me nervous. And then he seems to be impervious to them. Like he seems to be like whatever she's willing to dish out, he's happy to take. Yeah, for sure. So let's talk about, are we okay with this? This movie is clearly dancing around infidelity. And I kind of have a strong take. But before I do my strong take, I would like to hear your take. Oh, now I'm in three. Yeah. I mean, I mostly had it in the question category. Like it sounds like you have an answer and I have a question. But I mean, just to be clear so that you and I and the listeners are all on the same page here. He's married, he's run into Silline again for the first seven a long time and he is really flirty with her. He's coming on pretty hot. Absolutely. And it increases over time and he says things about his wife that she would have been presumably unhappy that he had said to another woman. Absolutely. And so does he cross the line? If so, when was it that he crossed the line? Was it only when he didn't get on his flight or was it systematically throughout the whole thing? And what responsibility did she have? So she was not flirting with him quite as much. I think he was more of the initiator. And yet she knows he's married and by and large doesn't put the caboch on any of his flirtation and indeed remains receptive. So, and when I think about the movie in its totality, I can't tell when he crossed a line or she crossed the line, but it certainly started to seem like by the end that they had crossed a line. So, I think a lot of movies have a structure where there's somebody in a relationship, in like relationship X and you, the audience are rooting for them to leave that relationship and get into relationship Y. So you could, you could level that criticism at this movie. And I would not. I think this movie is playing with these ideas in a much more thoughtful way. And that what the movie is asking us to think, at least with respect to Jesse, is, and I think his speech in the car makes the moral complexity here. And, and you know, this is in the car where he says, "Hell no, all right, I don't love her the way she needs to be loved and I don't even see a future for us, but then I look at my little boy sitting at the table across from me and I think I would suffer any torture to be with him for all the minutes of his life. You know, I don't want to miss out on one, but then there's no joy or laughter in my home. You know, and I don't want him going up in that." "Oh no, laughter. That's terrible. My parents have been together for 35 years and even when they have a bad fight, they end up laughing like crazy." "I just, I don't want to be one of those people getting divorced at 52 and falling down into tears, admitting that they never really love their spouse and they feel their life has been sucked up into a vacuum cleaner. You know, I want a great life. I want her to have a great life. She deserves that. All right, but we're just living in the pretence of a marriage responsibility. You know, all these just ideas of how people are supposed to live. Yeah, it's power. So that passage tells me there are three things pulling on him. His kid, his wanting to be around his kid. You know, the responsibility he has, that he feels to his marriage and his pull towards Celine, towards something that feels more fulfilling, more intimate, more passion and whatever it is. And I think the movie is just asking us to sit and experience that tension with him. It's not saying that one decision is morally more or less okay. It's just saying like, boy, this is tough, isn't it? When you're being pulled in these different directions. I think I agree with you that these are incredibly complicated, fraught moral decisions, but that to stand from on high and wag our finger at him is a gross oversimplification of what his circumstances were. Right. And I believe the movie neither wags a finger, nor asks you to root for something in a way that many, many other movies would. And that's why it speaks to me so much. It lets you just feel what he's going through in that moment. I'm dying for there to be a third one. Well, lucky for you. There was. I had one other little thing in terms of, are we okay with this? So again, one of the major themes, at least for me, but to some degree, both of us on this podcast is Grand Romantic gestures. And this movie doesn't really have that. It doesn't have the problem of the Grand Romantic gestures that we've been talking about it, but it has a variation on the theme. And this is when they're having the fight in the car. She's flapping her hand at him and I think in a pretty contemptuous way. And she says to the driver, let me out of the car. Let me out of the car. I need to get away from you, Jesse. I'm getting out of the car. And he says, no, no, no, stay. And he says to the driver, don't let, don't stop. Don't let her out of the car. And then she stays. And what's interesting about that is it's not really a Grand Romantic gesture in the traditional way, but it has in common with that theme, this idea that what are you going to do? Take no further answer. So I think it does contribute to this idea for better and for worse. I had complex views about this for better or for worse that like you should fight for your relationship even when your partner is pulling away from you. And I don't want to say you should never do that, but it is close enough to one of these tropes. And it's almost always the woman who's angry and leaving the man and the man who's doing this like, no, no, no, you're not allowed to leave me thing. And so I have just a little bit of squeamishness about it. I agree. And I was also a little squeamish at that scene too. It's like when two people are having a fight and one person is like, I need a break, you should be able to respect that. And I think the thing that was asking us to consider here is like, okay, she gets out of the car. That's it. I know. Right. I'm not seeing each other again. That's it. So that's where it's a little, it's a little more complicated than what we would consider to be appropriate conflict behavior. So talk to me about any other quotes that you've had. We have mentioned quite a few, but what about this? Funny. This movie is only 80 minutes long. I know. And I think every single line could have made it into our specials. I really, I'd love to mention a couple. Yeah. One of them is part of that car fight scene when she says, you come here to Paris, all romantic and married, okay, screw you. I don't know that I want to comment that much about it, but I get it. She's, yeah. She also has a torch for him. And she's trying to be respectful of the fact that she has a serious boyfriend. He's married. And yet he is being in her words all romantic and really put it into a very complicated, unwinable situation. And she's mad about it. And I think justifiably, I like that she's calling out the game. Right. I mean, that's really what she's doing in that moment. And again, this was part of that intimacy process that gradual unraveling is like, there's a lot of touch things that we're going to discover. As we go through this and she's like, look, let's be honest about what you're doing. This is what's happening totally. And I think even he might not have fully owned it yet. I yep. That's right. How about you? I love this little dialogue that they have back and forth. This is when they're on the boat. Well, the class is the past. It's meant to be that way. What? You really believe that? That everything's faded? Well, you know, the world might be less green than we think. Yeah. Yeah. When given this exact circumstances, that's what will happen every time. Too far hydrogen, one quarter of oxygen, you'll get water every time. No, no, no. No, no, no. What if your grandmother had lived a week longer, you know, or passed away a week earlier days, even, you know, things might have been different. I believe that. No, you can't think like that. I mean, I know you shouldn't have most things, but it's just it's, I mean, this one seemed like something was off. I mean, so again, this is this is a common tension that we talk about, right? Can, you know, if you if you run the whole simulation back and let it go again, to these two people find each other again, or do little perturbations along the way, you know, make it so that there are some misconnections and some found connections. And, you know, it just helps me to appreciate this tension between the randomness and the determinism and that's somehow relationships happen. And if we ran the whole thing back, we have no idea whether we will find each other. Unbearable lightness of being. Yeah, right, right. There you go. You know, it's funny. There's so many other lines. I think we've we've hit them mostly. One of the great lines that's come up multiple times already is, you know, I feel like I'm running a small nursery with someone I used to date. Just a profoundly pithy way of characterizing what I think a lot of people go through. Yeah. And then it's kind of relationship that I think a lot of people don't think about. But then when they do realize, oh, that is very scary. It's very scary. And it is not that rare. And one thing that's unknowable while you're running that nursery is, is this something that's true while the kids are young and we have these really complicated responsibilities, making sure that these, you know, little sort of helpless creatures make it and survive and develop language and can read and all those things. Or is there something sort of permanently gone? I think a lot of people when they have young kids are unsure which of those two things they're experiencing. And it is unknowable until more time has passed. Right. It's like wait 15 years and find out totally. Totally. And I really don't run into Celine again. Or rice. How about you, anything else? No, I mean, I want to talk about what we wish we knew. And here I want to talk about this philosopher that actually you introduced me to her name is Dr. Ruth Chang. And she talks about hard choices. Oh yeah. And I just feel like this is something that that people have thought about in a great deal. And, you know, but we don't quite understand the psychological experience to the extent that we could. But here's what she describes as a hard choice. It's when you've got essentially two paths you can go down. Jesse here could get on that plane and get back to his wife and kid. Or stay with Celine. And the problem of a hard choice is that you've got reasons on both sides. Both of your options satisfy some things but not other things. But they can't really be compared. That's the problem. Yeah. So it's like this is good for these reasons. This is good for these other totally different reasons. And I cannot possibly compare them and declare that one is better than the other. Right. And so what this philosopher says we should do is you should invent reasons that you and your own, you know, agency of self need to create reasons to pick one of the other. And I think what he is doing in this movie is we are watching him invent reasons to stay. And he just keeps you. doing it and he keeps doing it and he keeps doing it. And then when he's on the couch at the end, it's like he has decided, but not like in a, like I have made a choice and it is this is you kept inventing reasons to stay and now here you are and you are clearly going to miss that plane. Yeah. I just love that way of thinking about how people confront hard choices and I wish we studied this more the way a psychologist would, although I love the philosophy behind this. Oh, I love this and I agree. I wish we knew more about this. Let me ask you, when do you think he knew he was going to miss his plane? I think he knows he's going to miss his plane. Well, I was going to say when he's on the couch, but maybe when they're going up the stairs, he feels like a portal or something. So I don't know. So maybe then, but I think it's late. I think it is late in the game. I think that's my sense too. Yeah. So for people who haven't watched the movie as recently as we have, there's just a chronic background hum of her saying, you don't have time for this. You've got to go back and he says, no, I've got a little time. I got a little time and each time it's like a little bit and you think he's going to make the flight and it's all possible and he doesn't want to sit at the airport long anyway. And then basically in the last scene, you realize it's over, but it really isn't clear the moment at which he knew he was going to stay. I think I agree with you that he decided to miss his flight, that he didn't know that he was in the process of making that decision. Yeah. And that there was some incremental thing along the way, that there wasn't like a moment of decision. It was like a leaning in a direction and not deciding and then time ran out and he said, that's fine. I mean, it's, you know, there's a phrase in relationships research called sliding versus deciding. Right. And that's really about being in one relationship and sliding into marriage or deciding you want to marry this person. That's not what's happening here, but we are, we are watching a slow slide as he, he keeps making choices that make his path clear. Totally. You know, I had a couple really sort of quick things. I'd like to mention about things that I wish we knew. One is like, when are we upset if our partner shares private information about us? So this is an extreme case. That's really interesting. Yeah. I mean, he wrote a whole book about her and it's like thinly veiled and she absolutely knows that that book is about her and now that private information is public. That doesn't seem to upset her that much. On this podcast, I have informed our listenership that my my marriage is basically a failed one night stand. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I did. That was one that I actually asked my wife in advance. So like, I'm about to say something that's maybe pushing the limit. How do you feel about it and she gave me the thumbs up. But in general, I don't think we know that much about for whom or why or when we get upset when our partner shared something private about us. Yeah. And another thing that this movie made me think, I wish we knew more about that is the nature of meeting up with somebody after a time gap. Right. So you could have imagined an alternate sense. I mean, maybe they would have met up six months later, but now it's nine years later or maybe they had that incredible thing and there wasn't the long distance problem. And so then they just had the second date the next night. And what are the differences in the nature of how they interact together as a function of the fact that, you know, 45 minutes have passed versus six months have passed versus nine years have passed. We don't know much about that. That's really cool because it really does feel like they picked up where they left off their patterns clicked right back into place after that first night. But sometimes you meet somebody again after nine years and you're like, I feel like I'm meeting a stranger. We're like rediscovering how it is we interact, right? It's not always like this. Totally. Well, on this podcast, we rate movies from one to five stars. So Eli, I will ask you to go first. How many stars do you give before sunset? I gave this five stars. It's a perfect little movie with a perfect little ending. I just loved it. Not only do I give this movie five stars, this is legit one of my top five movies of a whole. Yeah, it is and it's probably my favorite romantic movie of all time. Yeah, that's great. This movie speaks to me in a real and deep way. I love it very much on this podcast. We also rate movies on rust bolts. Now the rust bolt is named after Eli's advisor, the late great Carol Rustbold pioneer of close relationships research with five stars indicating a near perfect depiction of the nature of close relationships. And I'm also at a five here. I found that every five five, everything that I had to say that was what I got wrong was quibble and felt like silliness. And so I think this movie nails that on all fronts, it's a powerful and realistic depiction of people facing some very tough challenges. Yeah, you are totally right. I gave this one four rust bolts. Again, my quibbles here are he seems to think that like if only he met the right person, things would have been better or at least that's one interpretation. And also, I was a little surprised when she was a little harsh on him, how open he was to being treated that way. But overall, these are quibbles and I found the movie remarkably wise about how relationships work. So four rust bolts overall. All right, well, this has been the Love Factually Podcast. And I'm Paul Eastwick. I've been here with Eli Fingle and Eli, I look forward to doing this with you next time. I look forward to it as well. The Love Factually Podcast is produced and edited by Paul Eastwick and Eli Fingle, featuring music from Andrew Fraker in Sons. To learn more about the research we discussed in this episode, find the notes on our substack. That's lovefactually.substack.com. [BLANK_AUDIO]