My Favorite Movies – Before Sunrise (1995)

By Tanner Smith

Here’s one from my personal top 5: Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise,” which is hands-down my favorite romance film.

“Before Sunrise” is a film about two people in their early 20s–an American man named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a French woman named Celine (Julie Delpy). They meet by chance on a train, start up a conversation, and form a nice connection–one that sadly has to end because Jesse has to get off in Vienna to catch a plane back home. But, in one of the best pickup scenes in movie history, Jesse convinces Celine to get off the train with him so they can spend the night talking some more:

“Think of it like this: 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, right? 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 out on. See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband to find out that you’re not missing out on anything. I’m just as big a loser as he is, totally unmotivated, totally boring, and you made the right choice, and you’re really happy.”

And it works! She gets off the train with him, and they spend the whole night just walking and talking, about numerous topics like philosophy, religion, love…all while they’re falling a little bit in love, which makes it all the more tragic that this might be the first and last time they spend together.
And, well…there are two sequels, so it’s safe to say they do see each other again (although it’s way down the road).

A lot of “Before Sunrise” is driven by dialogue, and what dialogue it is! I mentioned in my post about The End of the Tour that if you have the right actors playing the right characters saying the right dialogue, it can be some of the most powerful films I could ever pay attention to. That’s exactly the case here (and with the other two movies, “Before Sunset” and Before Midnight). Director Richard Linklater and his co-writer Kim Krizan wrote the initial script, but Hawke and Delpy actually rewrote a lot of it themselves, though they weren’t credited. (They did share credit with Linklater, however, in co-writing the sequels together.) That should tell you how much Hawke and Delpy care about their own characters and what they’re saying.

But what is “Before Sunrise” truly about? What do we learn about Jesse and Celine (and about ourselves as an audience) as we listen to them talk throughout the night? Well, through what we learn about the two (such as Jesse getting over a harsh breakup shortly before this fateful night), we could take away the theme of Jesse’s self-discovery through someone else. And perhaps Celine feels the same being around him. And maybe the two feel a strong connection in each other–maybe not a sense of “love” necessarily but more a sense of “fulfillment,” which leaves open room for a relationship (which makes the other two films all the more intriguing).

My favorite scene: this is one of my top five favorite movies, so it’s hard to pick just one to talk about. I love the pickup scene, I love the scene in which they imagine what they’ll each their friends about each other, I LOVE the ambiguous ending in which they go their separate ways and keep thinking about each other! But I guess if I have to pick one…there’s a scene in which Jesse and Celine are in a listening booth at a record store, and they listen to a song while trying to avoid eye contact. The body language from both Hawke and Delpy in that scene is nothing short of brilliant.

I love this movie. It’s a beautiful piece of art and I never get tired of listening to these two people talk about whatever they want. And I also love “Before Sunset” and “Before Midnight.”

I don’t have a lot of new material to add to “Before Midnight,” so you can reread my decade-end retrospective here (I called it my favorite film of the 2010s and I still stand by it). But “Before Sunset”…I’ll get to that one real soon.