I’m sure there must be multiple flaws in Before Sunset, but I’ll only admit to one. It’s the last line of the film. Jesse, a little sheepishly, a little thrilled, says “I know.” Maybe this is about his need to have the last word, maybe it’s about ensuring that everyone knows that this time he’s going to stay with Celine and not make the mistake of leaving her a second time. They’re both the wrong choice. The first is negated by the needs of making a better film. The second is negated by the fact that no one can believe that after that song, that day, that stretch of nine years without the one person they’re supposed to be with—no one can believe that after the way Celine says, “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane”—that Jesse will do anything but miss the plane. The plane is more likely to careen into the Atlantic Ocean or transform into a roc than it is to have Jesse on it.

The line comes out as a statement, a teasing and confident statement, but declarative. It’s the “baby” that does it. In Vienna, the attraction was so instantaneous, the adventure so tempting, the night so heady. In Paris, everyone’s careful about what s/he says. After the initial back and forth about why only one of them was in Vienna on the decided date, they keep to safe topics, or at least manageable ones. The conversations are more about partners than about their feelings for one another, and through the partners they both find out what they need to know. Celine admires her boyfriend, but his frequent absences makes her an overrun garden. Jesse married his wife without understanding her, and when she seemed to change, it was only because he had moved too fast. Celine complains that “the idea we can only be complete with another person is evil, right?” because she is terrified that that evil idea might have some merit. Jesse sighs, “I feel like if someone were to touch me, I’d dissolve into molecules,” the most writerly thing he says in this movie, and the saddest. In Celine’s apartment, she takes a risk. Jesse is “baby,” the loudest and clearest claim she’s ever made on him.

It’s an imperative sentence, though, not a declarative one. “You are gonna miss that plane” is a very sexy thing for Celine to command in Julie Delpy’s lightly accented voice. It is way less sexy if you imagine Mike Mazurki or Richard S. Castellano saying it, like it’s the kind of command that comes with a gun in your back. In Before Midnight, Jesse tells Celine, “I fucked up my whole life because of the way you sing, all right?” I take some issue with the verb there, but this line is a gun in his back. May we all be so lucky to feel the steel in our spine.