"Before Sunrise:" A Review

On a crowded train sits Jesse, birth name James and wandering American, failingly attempting to read Klaus Kinski’s autobiography as a German couple argues vociferously. French graduate student Celine, sitting next to the couple with a book of Bataille’s in hand, is distracted as well. When the heated foreign words reach yet higher levels of unrestrained dissatisfaction, Celine changes train neighbors and seats herself across from Jesse. A conversation ensues.

Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) spend the day (June 16th, the famous day that James Joyce dated Mr. Bloom’s wanderings around and conversations in and of Dublin, celebrated worldwide as Bloomsday) in Vienna, conversing with remarkable alacrity briefly on a wide array of topics, for they only have this one day together. Mating monkeys, feminism, reincarnation, their pasts, their present, their futures and more are covered as they visit the city’s most appealing places. In this straying conversation, this seeming digression from what any discriminating audience member would naturally believe is the plot of the film, is the plot of the film. Their communication with one another, open and honest and varied and trivial or of substance and intrigue—this, viewers, is the story. Sights and sounds pass and are accounted for; characters make brief—all too brief—appearances on this extraordinarily ordinary day; the pair close the gap that is dividing them.

A romance, this is. And to the world this film proclaims that romance is found in conversation, spontaneous conversation spoken and listened attentively to. They, and we, discover the intricate details of even their most subtle and hardly discernable personality traits by their declarations of love, of religion, of independence, and their reactions and responses to those wonders, to those words. With the most blunt and basic, abstract and outlandish topics covered, they, and we, realize as the story progresses how well they connect, and, therefore, desire as culmination the most intimate and lovely of connections.

With director Richard Linklater’s usual long takes—occasionally five or six minutes in length, sincerely different from the quick cuts of contemporary cinema—the couple is truly illuminated and presented for us to watch and consider closely their honest reactions, their slight smiles and eye rolls, their minute changes in expressions, and thus each character takes on a new dimension: we imagine we can find them on a train, on a street, just outside our house on any given day. And the performances are palpable enough that even those individuals used to typical commercial films of standardized plots and unnecessary obstacles and flashy, inflated performances, ostentatious and over-the-top, even they can enjoy these two characters and find their own traits, in large part or small, in either one, surrendering themselves to the seductively sweet cast and structure and emanating air of the film. Still, though, one should pay particular attention to the script. The relaxation of their conversation, the easy, flowing exchanges of dialogue and the sincerity involved is beautiful and with depth. Never has there been a more defined and romantic screen couple, never a pair more perfectly suited for one another, if only for a day.