Retrospective: Before Sunrise (Patreon)

Love is too young to know what conscience is.

I once had a five-hour conversation with a stranger on Amtrak. We were both en route to Providence, Rhode Island — me to stay with two friends for the summer, him to reunite with his estranged adult soon. It was like we were in two different movies, and his was more interesting. He'd lived an interesting life — survived the Jim Crow South as a young Black boy, joined the Air Force, become an amateur pilot, and barely avoided crashing a plane, earning him the admiration of John F. Kennedy Jr. I don't remember his name — we parted ways when we reached Providence. Maybe his attempt to reconnect with his son went well. I don't know what caused the breach between them. And I probably didn't tell him why I was housing unstable and staying with friends in New England. We told each stories and listened to each other's thoughts — no context except each other's words.

I thought about that man when I rewatched Before Sunrise. Our conversation was certainly different — he was probably more than twice my age, and we certainly weren't flirting with each other. I didn't follow him when our train stopped. But the connection between Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) felt familiar to me. It reminded me of that experiencing of microdosing a stranger's world through a long conversation. Jesse and Celine are both self-conscious and working on several levels of denial. They're young people — Celine says she's 23 — who have just started to figure out that the world is more complicated than teenagers like to think, but haven't reached an age where they can start understanding how to process life in a complicated world. Jesse is armed with Gen X cynicism, while Celine protects herself from the dangers of the unknown with chronic indecisiveness. Hawke and Delpy pepper the early scenes with wonderful little decisions, like Celine trying not to notice that Jesse is stroking her hair, or Jesse removing his coat and Celine pulling her hair back in anticipation of things heating up. They're constantly seeking each other's permission to make the next move, but never fully hearing a word the other one says. It's conversation, but not dialogue.

Yet Before Sunrise is a story where dialogue and seduction function as negotiation. Richard Linklater allows the space and the actors to tell the story for him — it's a nearly plotless movie, or one where events mostly happen in characters' heads (the most dramatic scene has to be that unbearably sexy scene on the Wiener Riesenrad). The Vienna that Jesse and Celine explore is an alternate world they step into for one night and can never return to. They preserve that moment, never returning to that city — one that doesn't mourn them when they leave. But that night in Vienna lives with them forever, a brief moment in time that warps everything. That alternate world takes over their life — and in the sequels, Linklater demonstrates just how clinging to that world, and that moment of excitement, both enriches and fucks up their lives.