Reviewed by Paul Christian Glenn
Director: Richard Linklater
Release: 1995
Rating: R
A friend has been telling me to rent Before Sunrise for about two years. I don’t know why I resisted. Maybe it was the DVD cover, which makes the film look like a particularly pretentious Harlequin episode. Maybe it was the fact that Ethan Hawke kinda rubs me the wrong way. Maybe it was the fact that the story sounded sort of - oh, all right - extremely dull. Whatever the reason, I finally got around to renting it this weekend. With the sequel (Before Sunset) about to be released in theatres, I figured now was as good a time as any. Plus, my only other option was 50 First Dates.
I can hardly even describe how much I liked this movie. It was so simple, so sweet, so straightforward. It is about two people who have a magic moment, and that only.
Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) are two strangers stuck in the same Eurail car. Jesse is an American who has found himself in Europe with nothing in particular to do. Celine is a college student returning to Paris after a brief holiday with her grandmother. They begin a casual conversation which generates unexpected sparks. They are both remarkably loquacious, and by the time they reach Jesse’s stop in Vienna, they’ve developed some kind of spontaneous bond.
He proposes a crazy idea: she should just get off the train with him. He has to fly back to America in the morning, but they could hang out together until then. This scene is pulled off with remarkable grace. What could have been a very creepy proposal actually plays rather sweet and innocent. She agrees, and off they go.
That’s it for the story. After they get off the train, they simply walk around Vienna and talk. They eat, they ride a ferris wheel, they get their palms read; but above all, they talk. And talk. And talk. The subjects range from sex to parents to politics to religion to death to…well, of course, love.
This is one mammoth of a conversation, peppered with the characters’ half-baked psychological observations and burgeoning philosophies about life. While that sounds petrifying, director Richard Linklater keeps things very casual. There are no pretensions here, no grand, solemn points to be made. Life has not yet beaten these characters down; their dialogue is easy and free-flowing, like the conversations you used to have in college, when these topics were not only stimulating, but also seemed vitally important. I think a lot of people will recognize these dialogues. For me it was always Village Inn at two-thirty in the morning, through a head full of black coffee and cigarette smoke.
“Plot is character?” Pfeh! These were two of the best characters I’ve ever seen on film. I’ll remember them. I woke up this morning thinking about them. Hawke and Delpy are required to carry the entire movie from start to finish, and they handle it with ease and grace. Their laughter is spontaneous, their sense of wonder contagious.
There is a moment in the movie Say Anything that is so perfect it astonishes me every time I see it. Two teens embark on a nervous first date, which ends up involving a loud party, drunken friends, and unexpected chaos which keeps them out all night long. As they drive home, the sun is coming up in the east, the morning deejay is playing tunes on the radio, and they begin to chat, alone, for the first time since he picked her up the night before. It is one of the most perfect moments I’ve ever seen captured on film. It truly feels like one of those rare, strange occasions when you’ve stayed out all night with someone you don’t really know. How you resent the dawn, because the night felt like some kind of magic, like a lovely dream that’s dissipating in the daylight.
And that’s how “Before Sunrise” felt to me. The whole movie felt like an exploration of that moment. It’s a bittersweet revelation of what could be, an indulgence in the naive sweetness of possibility.