two-paths-reasoning-before-sunrise Before Sunrise (1995)

A complete reasoning trace for the Two Approaches framework applied to Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. The film resists the framework's usual hooks — there is no antagonist, no plot machinery to fight, almost no plot at all — and the analytical work is to find the structural pivot underneath what looks like an undifferentiated stream of conversation. Talking out loud through the eleven steps.

Step 1. Famous quotes and themes

The film is mostly two people talking, so most of its lines are conversational rather than structural. Weighting for which lines are doing real work in the film's design:

Jesse on the train, the pitch (~min 15): "Jump ahead ten, twenty years, and you're married. Only your marriage doesn't have that same energy that it used to have. You start to blame your husband. You start to think about all those guys you've met in your life and what might have happened if you'd picked up with one of them. Well, I'm one of those guys. That's me. So think of this as time travel — from then to now — to find out what you're missing." The pitch is explicitly framed as a thought experiment that gives Céline a reason to act on a real impulse: treat me as fiction so the real thing can happen.
Céline on the riverbank near the bridge (~min 22): "Have you ever been in love?" The question that establishes the film's actual subject. Not "do you want to sleep with me," not "where are you going," but the question that turns the night into an inquiry rather than a flirtation.
The bum poet on the bridge (~min 51), reading the poem he composes around their requested word "milkshake": "Daydream delusion, limousine eyelash... I'm a delusion angel, I'm a fantasy parade." The poem the film stages as its own self-description — the night is the daydream, the participants know it is, and the question is what happens when the daydream ends.
Céline at the listening booth (the silent eye-contact scene, ~min 27): No quotable line — what's significant is the absence of speech for an extended period while they look at each other and look away in the mirror-walled cubicle. The film's first sustained refusal of its own dialogue mode.
Jesse in the café late (~min 80), the mock long-distance phone calls: They take turns calling imaginary friends to describe the other one — Céline calls a friend to confess she's falling for the American; Jesse calls a friend to describe Céline. The conversation is a structural device for saying things to each other under the cover of pretending to say them to someone else. The fictional frame is the load-bearing element.
Céline near the harpsichord scene (~min 91): "I think I can really fall in love when I know everything about someone — the way he's gonna part his hair, which shirt he's gonna wear that day, knowing the exact story he'd tell in a given situation. I'm sure that's when I know I'm really in love." The film's most explicit theory of love — and one whose truth the film's setup makes impossible to test, because they have one night.
Both at the dawn farewell (~min 94): "Let's not, you know — let's not exchange phone numbers, addresses." "Yeah." "And we'll meet here, six months from now... December." "Okay." The decision the climax stages — they agree both to make the commitment (return) and to refuse the insurance (numbers).
Jesse on the train to Céline (~min 13): "If somebody gave me the choice right now, of either to never see you again or to marry you, I would marry you." A line whose structural meaning is to register, even at minute thirteen, that the bounded-ness of the night is going to be the film's pressure rather than its escape.

Themes surfaced:

The gap between pretending and meaning it. The night runs on framing devices — the train-pitch as time-travel, the phone calls to imaginary friends, the bum-poet-as-prophet — that let the participants say true things while denying that they're saying them. The arc of the film is about which of these framings remains a frame and which dissolves.
Bounded time as the structural pressure. The film tells us at minute fifteen that we have until morning; everything after is staged inside that countdown. The countdown is not an obstacle to the relationship; it is the condition that makes the relationship's actual subject (presence, attention, what counts as "really" knowing someone) legible.
Knowing vs. having known. Céline's love-as-knowing speech is an articulation of a stable, settled love that the night cannot produce. The post-midpoint question is whether something else — concentrated attention to the unknown — can do the work she has assigned to long acquaintance.
Refusing the safety net. The decision not to exchange numbers is the film's most distinctive structural move and the climax's actual content. Insurance against losing each other would convert the night into a beginning; refusing insurance keeps it as a self-contained event that they nonetheless commit to repeating.

These themes will shape the candidate theories in Step 2.

Step 2. Three theories of the gap

Theory A — Strategy gap: hedge vs. commit to the bounded thing. Jesse and Céline arrive on the train as guarded young people who hedge their feelings with irony, framing devices, and protective distance. The approach they need is to commit — really commit — to what the night actually is, which means dropping the hedges and saying the true things even though morning will end it. Under this theory the midpoint is wherever they stop hedging, and the climax is whether they can sustain the un-hedged stance through a structural pressure that invites them to either secure the future (exchange numbers) or evacuate the present (stay clinical and walk away). This theory predicts the climax to be at the dawn farewell, where the question of insurance is the test of un-hedged commitment.

Theory B — Epistemic gap: love-as-having-known vs. love-as-attention. Céline's stated theory of love — knowing every shirt, every story — is incompatible with the night's structure. The approach the film tests is whether concentrated attention to a stranger can produce the same thing love-by-acquaintance is supposed to produce, or whether it produces something different but equally real. Under this theory the midpoint is wherever the attention-mode is shown to do load-bearing work that acquaintance was supposed to do, which would be one of the long un-narrated stretches — the listening booth, the cemetery, the riverbank near the poet — where they stop describing themselves to each other and start seeing each other. The climax is the dawn decision because it is the first decision they make as people whose frame for the relationship is "what we have produced by attention this night."

Theory C — Existential / fictional-frame gap. The night is enabled by a series of fictional frames — Jesse's time-travel pitch, the phone calls to imaginary friends, the bum poet's poem — that let the participants act as if the encounter were a daydream rather than their actual lives. The approach the film tests is whether the frames can be dropped at the right moment, leaving real address to a real person, or whether the frames remain as a thin shell that protects the participants from the consequence of having met. Under this theory the midpoint is the moment a frame is dropped and a real thing is said in plain view; the post-midpoint approach is to keep dropping frames; the climax tests whether the un-framed mode can carry the most exposed moment in the film, which is the dawn parting.

The three theories are genuinely different. Theory A is about emotional commitment to the night's shape. Theory B is about a theory of knowing. Theory C is about the protective fictions that enable the night to happen at all. They predict different midpoints and slightly different climaxes.

Step 3. Four candidate climaxes, tested against each theory

Candidate 1 — The Ferris-wheel kiss (~min 36). They ride the Prater, sun setting; Jesse asks if she'll kiss him and she does; the city wheels behind them. Tests: Stakes — modest. This is a first-kiss scene that the film stages romantically but then immediately keeps moving past. Destination feel — no; the film has 65 minutes still to run after it. Theory A reads it as the first un-hedged moment but not the test of un-hedged commitment under pressure. Theory B reads it as confirmation that attention can produce the standard kiss-image but not as the load-bearing test of attention-as-knowing. Theory C reads it as a frame still active (the Ferris wheel as fairground apparatus). Verdict: not the climax. It functions as the first escalation point inside the rising action — the sealing of "yes, this is happening" inside a still-bounded fiction.

Candidate 2 — The mock long-distance phone calls in the café (~min 80). Jesse and Céline take turns calling imaginary friends to describe each other; they end up saying truths about each other and themselves that they couldn't say in plain address. Tests: Stakes — interior, high; this is the most exposed mutual statement of feeling in the film. Destination feel — strong middle-late feel; the scene reads as a culmination, not a destination. Theory A reads it as commitment-by-irony, sustained but not yet tested. Theory B reads it as the moment attention has produced the kind of mutual seeing Céline's love-by-acquaintance speech tried to define — but produced through a still-active fictional frame. Theory C reads it as a frame deployed at full strength and then dropped (they hang up the imaginary phones and look at each other directly). This scene is doing a lot of work, but it doesn't satisfy criterion (a) — it doesn't feel like the destination. Verdict: not the climax. It is structurally the post-midpoint Escalation 2 — the highest-pressure deployment of the fictional frame just before it gets dropped permanently.

Candidate 3 — The dawn farewell at the Westbahnhof (~min 94). They walk to the platform; her train is leaving; they decide, in real time and out loud, not to exchange numbers and to meet in six months on track nine. The whistle blows; she gets on; they say goodbye. Tests: Stakes — maximum within the film's terms (the relationship's continuance, the question of whether what they had can survive the morning). Destination feel — maximum; the entire film has been structured as a countdown to this departure. Theory A reads this as the test of un-hedged commitment: can they sustain an un-hedged stance under the pressure to either secure the future (numbers) or evacuate the present? They do both — return without insurance — which is the most un-hedged move available. Theory B reads this as the test of attention-as-knowing: do they have enough of each other from one night to commit to a return without the apparatus of acquaintance? They decide they do. Theory C reads this as the moment all the fictional frames are stripped and they make a decision in plain address — no time-travel, no imaginary phone calls, no bum poet, just a real promise about a real date. Verdict: strongest candidate. All three theories produce this scene, but Theory A produces its specific shape — the no-numbers decision is structurally "stop hedging" — most directly.

Candidate 4 — The riverbank scene with the bum poet's poem (~min 51). A bum on the bridge offers to make a poem from a word; they give him "milkshake"; he writes "Daydream delusion... I'm a delusion angel, I'm a fantasy parade." Tests: Stakes — modest; this is a tonal peak in the rising action. Destination feel — no, the film has 50 minutes left. Theory A reads it as the first un-hedged moment via the cover of a third party's words. Theory B reads it as a piece of attention being produced for them by an outsider. Theory C reads it as an active fictional frame that names itself ("delusion angel"). Verdict: not the climax. Functions as a structural moment inside the rising action that previews the film's argument — "this is a delusion / this is real" is the film's central oscillation, articulated by the poet because the participants can't yet say it themselves.

Pairing analysis: All three theories converge on the dawn farewell as the climax. The differences are in what the climax tests. Theory A reads it as a test of un-hedged commitment; Theory B reads it as a test of attention-as-knowing; Theory C reads it as the test of un-framed address. The pairing that produces the climax's specific shape — the no-numbers decision in particular — is Theory A, with Theory C close behind. Theory B explains the pairing's content well (they do know each other in the relevant sense) but predicts a different decision shape (a more knowing-related test, perhaps an exchange of an emblematic detail rather than a refusal of insurance). I'll hold A as primary with C as the deeper layer.

Step 4. Locate the midpoint under each theory; select the best pairing

Under Theory A (hedge vs. commit): The midpoint is the listening booth (~min 27) — the silent eye-contact in the mirror-walled cubicle, the moment they stop talking and let attention do the work that talking has been doing. After the listening booth, the conversational mode of the film changes: less tactical sparring, more open-ended questions. The hedges drop in real time. This midpoint is bounded (a single scene) and structurally clean.

Under Theory B (knowing vs. attention): The midpoint is the cemetery — the Cemetery of the Nameless (~min 30), where Céline tells Jesse about visiting it as a child and imagining herself as the old woman lying down to die. This is the first moment one of them gives the other something only attention could produce — the kind of detail Céline's later love-as-knowing speech would categorize as needing months of acquaintance to extract. After the cemetery the film begins to treat the knowing-by-attention as already accomplished; subsequent scenes test what's done with it.

Under Theory C (frames vs. plain address): The midpoint is the bum poet's poem on the bridge (~min 51). The poet names the fictional frame ("I'm a delusion angel, I'm a fantasy parade") inside which the night has been operating, and the act of having the frame articulated by an outside voice begins the work of dropping it. The post-midpoint approach is to keep dropping frames until the dawn farewell, where there are no frames left.

Selection. The strongest midpoint–climax pair is Theory A with the listening booth as midpoint and the dawn farewell as climax. The listening booth is the cleanest single-scene structural pivot — the pre-booth Jesse and the pre-booth Céline are still in train-pitch mode, sparring tactically, framing themselves as types; the post-booth versions are not. The listening-booth scene also explains the next twenty minutes of the film: the Ferris wheel kiss, the cemetery monologue, the palm reader, the bum poet, all read as a series of post-hedge moves — un-defended openings — that wouldn't be characterological for the pre-booth pair. Under Theory B the cemetery is more thematically central but later in screen time and harder to bound as the structural pivot (the cemetery is itself a post-listening-booth move). Under Theory C the bum poet is too late to anchor the midpoint (it's at minute 51, more than half the film).

I am setting:

Midpoint: The listening booth at the record store (~min 27). A single bounded scene — they enter, put a record on, stand in the mirror-walled cubicle, and exchange long sidelong looks while neither says anything for the duration of the song. The pre-midpoint film's mode (tactical talking) breaks; the post-midpoint film's mode (concentrated attention, real speech, dropped frames) takes its place.
Climax: The dawn farewell at the Westbahnhof (~min 94), the moment they decide not to exchange numbers and to meet on track nine in six months. The decision is the test of the post-midpoint approach (commit fully to the now without insurance against the future) and is staged as a real-time choice between hedge (numbers) and un-hedge (return without numbers).

Note: the choice of midpoint affects what the rest of the structure does. Egg-eating analogue (pre-midpoint apex of initial approach) is the train-pitch itself ("get off the train with me") — it's the apex of the bluff mode that the listening booth then quietly breaks. Note also: the Ferris wheel kiss gets re-classified to Escalation 1 (the post-midpoint pressure that intensifies before the bigger turns), and the phone-calls-to-imaginary-friends gets re-classified to Escalation 2 (the highest-pressure deployment of the fictional frame just before it must be dropped at the train).

Step 5. Quadrant

Initial approach: Treat the night as a thought experiment — a hypothetical, time-travel, what-if frame in which both can be vulnerable while denying the vulnerability. Jesse's pitch on the train is the explicit articulation; Céline's willingness to play along ratifies it. Hedge by framing.

Post-midpoint approach: Drop the hedges. Let attention do the work the framing was doing. Say true things in plain address; when frames are useful (the imaginary phone calls), use them once and then drop them; commit to the night as itself rather than as a stand-in for something else.

Climax test: They walk to the train. The pressure converges on a single decision: exchange numbers or not. The hedged move is to exchange them and convert the night into the prologue of an ordinary long-distance courtship — which would retroactively make the night a means rather than an end. The un-hedged move is to commit to a return without insurance — to declare that the night was a self-sufficient event that nonetheless deserves a sequel, and to put the sequel's possibility at risk for the sake of the night's integrity. They take the un-hedged move.

Quadrant placement. Three readings to test:

Better tools / sufficient (classical comedy). Reads the post-midpoint approach as growth — they learn to be present, drop the protective frames, and commit to what's actually happening. The climax's no-numbers decision rewards that growth in the only currency the film traffics in: the integrity of the night. The morning at empty Vienna locations is the wind-down that confirms the new equilibrium has been established.
Better tools / insufficient (sound-tools-defeated). Reads the no-numbers decision as the right call that the world will not honor — the sequel they imagine will not happen, so the climax destroys what it appears to validate. This reading is what the sequel Before Sunset (2004) retroactively activates: we learn Jesse comes back, Céline does not, and for nine years they live with the choice. From inside Before Sunrise alone, however, this reading is unavailable; the film does not stage the failure.
Worse tools / sufficient (black comedy). No fit. The film does not stage the post-midpoint approach as descent.

The decisive question is whether to read Before Sunrise as a self-contained 1995 film or in the light of its sequels. Inside the 1995 film, the climax holds and the wind-down rewards the holding — the hawn shots of the empty park bench, the empty wine bottles and glasses on the riverbank, the empty record store window are framed as the fading-but-real residue of something that happened, not as evidence the something didn't matter. The morning's emptiness is bittersweet but not invalidating.

Placement: Better tools / sufficient — classical comedy in a quiet register. The film fits the better/sufficient quadrant despite the relationship not continuing past the morning, because the climax's actual test is not "will they end up together" but "can they commit fully to a bounded thing." They can. The quadrant placement is stable for the film as a 1995 release. The sequels reframe but do not retroactively change the structural fact of the 1995 ending.

A note: this is the same structural move Casablanca makes (better/sufficient with bittersweet sufficiency — Rick grows, the new approach works, but the cost is the relationship the growth was about). Before Sunrise is Casablanca's structural cousin, with the politics of WWII replaced by the structural pressure of the train schedule.

Step 6. Escalation points and early-establishing scenes

Escalation 1 (pre-midpoint apex, accelerator into the midpoint). The Ferris wheel kiss (~min 36). After the listening booth has already reset the mode of the conversation, the Ferris wheel kiss is the body-level escalation that puts the new attention-mode under pressure to declare itself romantically. The rotation of the wheel matches the rotation of the night around the new attention-mode: it's fixed, it's circling, and now they've kissed. Wait — that's post-midpoint by my schedule. Let me re-check.

Actually, looking again at the timeline: listening booth ~27m, cemetery ~30m, Ferris wheel ~36m. The midpoint is the listening booth. So the Ferris wheel is post-midpoint. It is Escalation 2 in the chronological sense — the body-level confirmation of what the listening booth opened. Then the bridge poet (~51m), the Arena-bar conversations (~55–62m), the palm reader (~37m, actually pre-Ferris — let me check)...

Reordering by timestamp: train arrival/pitch (~min 13–15), riverbank "have you been in love" (~22m), listening booth (~27m), cemetery (~30m), palm reader (~37m), Ferris wheel (~36m), the bridge with bum poet (~51m), the long Arena-bar conversations about exes (~55–62m), the pinball-bar mock argument (~63–67m), the bartender wine scene (~80m), the imaginary phone calls (~80m), the harpsichord dance (~91m), the dawn farewell (~94m).

Hmm, the listening booth at 27m is quite early — ~27% of the way through. That's atypical for a midpoint. Let me reconsider.

The film runs ~101 minutes. Halfway is ~50m. The bum poet on the bridge is at 51m. Under Theory C, the bum poet is the midpoint — and his "delusion angel" line names the fictional frame the night has been running on. That's structurally clean, dead-center in the runtime, and positioned right where a midpoint is expected. Let me reconsider the selection in Step 4.

Reconsidering: the listening booth is too early to be the midpoint by runtime. The bum poet is dead center and names the frame. Under Theory C the post-midpoint is "drop the frames" and the climax is "no frames left." The cemetery (~30m) and listening booth (~27m) and palm reader (~37m) all become rising-action moves — within them the film's mode shifts gradually, but the named pivot doesn't happen until the bridge.

Revised midpoint: the bum poet's poem on the bridge (~min 51). The poet hands them a poem that names what they're doing as a "delusion" / "fantasy parade." Receiving the poem is the moment the film puts the question of fictional-frame vs. plain address on the table. After the bridge, the conversation in the Arena bar gets explicitly autobiographical (Céline's ex-boyfriend story, Jesse's girlfriend-in-Madrid confession), the imaginary phone calls follow, and the harpsichord-dance silence and dawn farewell complete the descent into plain address.

Updated theory selection: Theory C is now primary, with Theory A as a closely related surface reading. The midpoint–climax pair is the bum poet's poem and the dawn farewell. The post-midpoint approach is to drop the frames, which means saying the true autobiographical things (the Arena-bar confessions), then deploying the imaginary phone calls as a hyperbolic last gasp of the frame, then dropping it for good in the harpsichord-dance silence and the dawn decision.

Escalation 1 (pre-midpoint). The Ferris wheel kiss (~min 36). The body-level escalation inside the still-active fictional frame — the kiss is romantic and beautiful and contained inside the fairground apparatus that lets it remain a "scene." It accelerates the midpoint by raising the pressure on the frame to do more work than it's structurally able to do.

Escalation 2 (post-midpoint). The imaginary phone calls in the café (~min 80). The frame deployed at maximum strength — they say the most exposed things they will say in the film, but only by pretending to say them to absent third parties. After the calls, the frame is exhausted; from here to the train, the film is in plain address mode. The phone calls are the structural twin of the bridge poem: both are scenes where the frame is articulated at full strength, and the second one is the frame's last load-bearing deployment before it disappears.

Early-establishing scenes. The German couple arguing on the train (~min 5–8). Céline moves seats; Jesse looks up. The scene establishes the train as a space where private fights become public, which sets up the night's inverse premise: a private connection in public space. The marital fight is the equilibrium-state of relationships the film is implicitly asking about — long-acquaintance love as fighting in a foreign language while strangers watch. The opening hands the audience the equipment for understanding what the night is not.

Jesse's first lines to Céline establish his initial approach: irony, deflection, framing devices. He doesn't ask if she speaks English — he asks if she has any idea what the couple was arguing about. The form of the question is the form of the night: third-person, abstracted, mediated. The pre-midpoint Jesse will keep doing this, and the post-midpoint Jesse will not.

Step 7. Equilibrium and inciting incident

Equilibrium. Jesse alone on the Eurail train, reading. Céline a few rows back, reading her own book. Both passengers in their separate cabins of motion — both traveling, neither yet arrived. The equilibrium is "I am between things, and the between-ness is the protective frame I'm carrying." Jesse will fly home from Vienna in the morning; Céline will reach Paris in the morning. The equilibrium of each protagonist is a state of bounded transit, and the film's premise will be that bounded transit is not actually a place where nothing can happen — it's where something specific can happen, with specific terms.

The German couple's fight breaks the equilibrium without yet being the inciting incident — it shows the equilibrium is unstable, that the public-space-of-strangers can be invaded by private-life-of-relationships at any moment. The fight makes Céline move; the move is the proximate cause but not the structural one.

Inciting Incident. Céline takes the seat across from Jesse and they begin to talk. The conversation across the train table — about the German couple, then about parents, then about love — is the inciting incident. It's not Jesse's later "get off the train with me" pitch; that's the commitment. The inciting incident is the conversation itself, the moment two strangers begin doing the thing that turns out to be the film. The disruption of the equilibrium is that Jesse is no longer reading and Céline is no longer reading, and the protective bounded-ness of transit has been compromised by an active interpersonal fact: this conversation is going somewhere.

Step 8. Three candidates for the Commitment point

Chronologically the Commitment sits between the inciting incident (the train conversation begins) and the rising action (the night in Vienna). Three candidates:

Candidate A — The lounge-car scene (~min 6–13). Jesse and Céline have moved to the lounge car; the conversation opens out into Sorbonne, Budapest, Eurail, parents converting childhood ambitions, Jesse's dead-grandmother-in-the-garden-hose-mist story, Céline's fear of flying. Test: This is intimate but pre-decision; both are still on a train going to their separate destinations, and no commitment line has been delivered yet. Not the strongest candidate.

Candidate B — Jesse's "get off the train with me" pitch in Vienna (~min 15). As the train pulls into Westbahnhof, Jesse delivers the time-travel pitch and asks Céline to get off the train. He has nothing — no hotel reservation she can join, no plan, no back-pocket cool — and the offer is explicitly structured as "treat me as a hypothetical so you can act on what you actually want." Test: This is the moment after which one of them commits or doesn't; it forces the decision. The pitch itself is the form of the initial approach (frame-as-license-to-act). Strong candidate.

Candidate C — Céline's decision to get off the train (~min 16). She listens, says yes, gets her bag, gets off. The actual visible action that converts the pitch into the night. Test: Cleanest visible decision; the body-level commitment. But the structural commitment was made in the previous beat — Jesse committing by asking, Céline committing by hearing it through and saying yes is the same scene's conclusion. Hard to separate B and C cleanly.

Selection: Commitment = the pitch-and-acceptance scene at Westbahnhof arrival (~min 15–16). Treat the pitch and the acceptance as a single bounded scene whose internal structure is Jesse offers an explicit fictional frame; Céline accepts the frame. After this scene the project — the night in Vienna — is real and underway. The commitment is unusual for the framework because both protagonists are committing at once; but the commitment-quality is clean (after this scene the film is the project).

Step 9. Full structure

(See two-paths-structure-before-sunrise.md for the abbreviated version.)

The chronological sequence:

Equilibrium: Train, separate seats, reading. Bounded transit.
Inciting Incident: Céline takes the seat across from Jesse; conversation begins.
Resistance / Debate: The lounge-car conversation as an extended, formally polite hesitation about whether this conversation matters.
Commitment: Jesse's pitch and Céline's acceptance at Westbahnhof.
Rising Action / Initial Approach: The early Vienna walk — bridge, tram, record store entry, listening booth, cemetery, palm reader, Ferris wheel, bridge with bum poet — under the still-active fictional frame.
Escalation 1: The Ferris wheel kiss. Body-level confirmation of the frame.
Midpoint: The bum poet's poem on the bridge. The frame is named.
Falling Action / Post-Midpoint Approach: The Arena-bar confessions about exes; the bartender wine-credit scene; the autobiographical mode.
Escalation 2: The imaginary phone calls. The frame at maximum deployment, then exhausted.
Climax: The dawn farewell at the Westbahnhof. The no-numbers decision.
Wind-Down: Empty Vienna locations the next morning. The new equilibrium: a bounded thing successfully held.

Step 10. Stress test

Walking the structure: does the post-midpoint approach (drop the frames, plain address) explain the most compelling moments?

The harpsichord dance scene (~min 91) — Céline in a courtyard with a young woman playing a harpsichord, dancing alone for a moment, Jesse watching. Dialogue minimal; the scene runs on attention. Under the structure this is the late-falling-action moment where the post-midpoint mode (attention without frame) carries the film's most extended silence. Yes, the structure explains it.
The wine-stealing-the-glasses scene (~min 80–82) — Jesse goes into a bar, asks the bartender for a bottle of wine on credit, promises to pay him back from the States. The bartender complies. This is a late-night-in-the-park sub-scene that has the texture of a frame ("we need wine; let's pretend the bartender will trust us") that the bartender then ratifies into reality. This is exactly the structure's claim — frames work when you're willing to drop them and the world cooperates. Yes.
Céline's cemetery monologue (~min 30) — pre-midpoint by the runtime structure I've selected. This is a piece of attention-mode emerging inside the still-active frame. Theory B's preferred midpoint scene. Under Theory C it's a forerunner of the midpoint, not the midpoint itself. Acceptable.
Jesse's confession he doesn't have money for a hotel (~min 16) — establishes that the commitment is materially asymmetric (his project has a budget constraint; hers doesn't), which is part of why the night is what it is (walking the city all night because there's nowhere to go). The structure handles this fine inside the commitment scene's content.

I think the structure stands. One residual question: is the cemetery scene really a rising-action moment or is it a stealth-midpoint? I'm going to keep the bum-poet midpoint because the bum-poet scene is the one where the frame is articulated as a frame, which is the structural hinge. The cemetery is a piece of plain-address attention inside an otherwise still-framed mode — which is exactly what rising-action attention-mode looks like in this film.

No remap needed. Step 11 not invoked.