Before Sunrise is back in cinemas – and, 30 years on, it’s far sadder than it used to be

The years shall run like rabbits,” says Jesse, quoting poetry to Celine at the end of Before Sunrise. It’s a midsummer morning in the city of Vienna. Church bells chiming; pigeons in the square. The film’s young lovers – played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy – are relaxing by a statue, rumpled from their long night outdoors. On screen, they’re still there whenever we choose to drop by – him with his goatee, her with her backpack. In the real world it’s different, because those pesky rabbits keep running. Cities change and actors age and first love becomes a distant memory. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise – possibly the most rapturous film ever made about footloose, carefree youth – is 30 years in the past, and as much a historical relic as old Vienna itself.

Anniversary reissues are a dime a dozen, but the reappearance of Before Sunrise feels sympathetic, appropriate, almost a creative act in its own right. Callow Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) meet cute on the train and disembark on a whim. They have no cash for a hotel, and nothing to do until the next morning except wander and wonder and decide how much they like each other. That’s essentially the film: two people walking and talking and pausing to kiss. These lovers have stolen a day for themselves and can skip around town like they haven’t a care in the world. But carefree youth only counts when it’s fleeting and finite. Linklater knows this and so too, on some level, do Jesse and Celine. It’s this ticking clock that makes Before Sunrise so special. It’s a film about a subject its characters are determined to avoid.

Time is Linklater’s abiding fascination. The ticking clock is his co-director. And while his best films look weightless, full of seemingly inconsequential small details, they come to remind us that life is short and all the more sweet for its shortness. Dazed and Confused – a Seventies-set school’s-out comedy – toasted a bygone world of teenage exuberance and was inevitably coloured by the tint of nostalgia. The Oscar-winning Boyhood was shot piecemeal over 12 years to show its main player, Ellar Coltrane, literally growing up on the screen. Linklater’s current project, Merrily We Roll Along, is set to span two whole decades and won’t be completed until 2039. It’s less a film, says the director, than a kind of ongoing time sculpture.

Linklater initially saw Before Sunrise as a single standalone tale. But its loose ends snagged his interest and he proceeded to revisit the characters at nine-year intervals, first running them down in Paris for Before Sunset (2004) and then on a Greek holiday in Before Midnight (2013). Both sequels are wonderful, too, in their way, although they’re more sober and reflective, which of course is the point. People get older, relationships are a chore. Linklater, incidentally, hasn’t ruled out a fourth film in the series: a portrait of the one-time young lovers in their greying mid-fifties. Production on this might be imminent; equally it might not happen at all. Time, as they say, will eventually tell.

It’s the nature of the business that today’s slice-of-life modern movie becomes tomorrow’s antique. Irrelevant local details open a window to the past. I like the Fifties Ealing comedy The Ladykillers in part because it shows us what London’s grubby King’s Cross used to look like, with its steam trains and horses and tumbledown little houses. Taxi Driver these days is a record of ungentrified Seventies Manhattan. Laurel and Hardy shorts provide a freewheeling tour of 1930s LA.

Before Sunrise has now slipped into history as well – albeit in ways Linklater could never have predicted. Billed at the time as an Interrailer’s romance, the film inhabits a prelapsarian old Europe that looks gauchely, comically at ease with itself. There is no mention of Brexit, let alone climate change. The diners freely smoke in restaurants; even the dignified ma?tre d’ sparks up a cigarette. There are street poets by the Danube and grunge bands in the bars. Crucially, too, no one has a phone. That means no geo-tracking, no memes, no messages from outside. The lovers are able to live entirely in the moment, convinced for a spell that their happy dream-world won’t end.

On the train, at the start, Jesse asks Celine to picture her life many years in the future; to imagine how she might feel if she didn’t take a chance and join him in town for the night. “Think of this as time travel,” he tells her. “From then to now.” With this week’s anniversary, the situation’s reversed. We live in that future and the film’s in the past. With each passing decade it grows more distant and exotic, adding fresh layers of meaning to Linklater’s lifelong preoccupation with time.

It’s a cause for celebration, having Before Sunrise back on screen. I hope it finds a new audience, the next generation of lovers. But for those who remember it the first time around, this reunion is likely to be edged with sadness. One measure of great work is that it’s an ongoing conversation that reveals different sides with each catch-up. The film doesn’t change, but the viewer grows older and views the work through fresh eyes. And so it is with Before Sunset, which I saw and loved on first release, when I was about the same age as Jesse and Celine. That’s half a lifetime ago now; those years ran like rabbits.

In 1995, Before Sunrise felt uncomplicatedly joyous. Nowadays it feels heart-piercing, almost too much to bear. This, it occurs, is the director’s late-breaking masterstroke. He’s embedded us in his picture and made us time sculptures ourselves, just as wedded to the clock as the people we’re watching. Life moves at speed and precious moments hurry by. Or as Jesse puts it, quoting Auden by the statue: “Let not Time deceive you. You cannot conquer Time.”