Before Sunrise (1995)

Director: Richard Linklater
Story: Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
Music: Fred Frith
Time: 101 minutes
Bottom-line: Nothing fancy, nothing big...but that’s why it is charming

Linklater’s third film and the first film of the “Before” trilogy, Before Sunrise brings together Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in this beautiful, simple love story. The entire story takes place over one evening and the night, but it will leave you thinking about it for days or weeks to come.

When love can come as a complete surprise.
June 16, 1994 – Jesse (Hawke) is an American travelling on a train to Vienna to catch a flight back to the US. On the train he meets Celine (Delpy), a university student returning back to Paris. As the converse in the lounge car, Jesse’s stop arrives. He convinces Celine to get off at Vienna with him, by telling her that she may regret this opportunity to start a relationship with him, some 20 years down the line. As the couple walk around Vienna they discuss various topics – love, religion, past relationships... and by next morning, both of them would have had perhaps the greatest night of their lives.

Hawke as Jesse and
Delpy as Celine 

You may have seen various other really emotional love stories, but none of them have the simplicity of Before Sunrise. Jack and Rose aboard the Titanic needed the actual disaster as a backdrop; The Fault in our Stars used cancer as a setting... while Before Sunrise just needed a candid camera. Jesse and Celine meet under normal circumstances, and fall in love the way most couples do – by just talking and being with each other. There’s no heroic incident, or sexual encounter; the story is so smoothly flowing it’s like the actors didn’t know they were being filmed. A scene I found interesting was the one where both of them pretend to call their best friends and tell their true feelings about each other (that is the only scene where they act). The future between Jesse and Celine after the screen cuts to black is left for the viewers to decide.

Both Hawke and Delpy deliver natural performances. Their exchanges, actions and expressions seem unscripted and it doesn’t look like acting at all! From the start both of them just converse like ordinary strangers who happened to meet, and before the next hour and a half you realise that they have fallen so deeply in love while spending just one evening and a night together. The scene where Jesse persuades Celine to get off at Vienna is one of the best moments – he says nothing out of the ordinary but yet in few minutes convinces her to make a life changing decision! I think Linklater excels when it comes to making realistic stories (he even filmed the film Boyhood over 12 years for this purpose), and that is why this film stands apart in the romance genre.

Yes it’s true there’s no comedy in the film, and barely any melodrama... but it is a love story of two people in their twenties that you can relate to. This is the first installment in one of the most successful trilogies, as far as ratings go (this film having an outstanding 100% Fresh rating), and it is certainly worth a watch, for all teenagers and adults alike.

My Rating: 4/5
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 100%