My sophomore year of college, I was working late one night as a desk clerk at one of the dorms. There was usually nothing to do except sit and read, and talk to anyone coming in who was equally bored as I was. That night, three guys walked in and we started talking about music. We talked for a full half hour, during which we performed an impromptu performance of the Beatles "Blackbird", which I sang. They invited to me to join their band as the lead singer. We exchanged contact information, and as I left, I looked at the card and saw a glimpse into the future- I was never going to call them, and they were never going to call me.
Before Sunrise is a movie about romantic encounter like that, one that we have all had at least once, and sometimes repeatedly- with different people, of course and we do not often realize the chances for the relationship working out- usually, low.
The romance here is between two Gen-X'ers in their early twenties, an American named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a Frenchwoman called Celine (Julie Delpy). They meet on a train to Vienna, talk, connect, and keep on talking and walking around the city all night. There's not much more to the movie then that, but it is a testament to Richard Linklater's direction that the movie comes of as generally real believable. Although I didn't like either Celine or Jesse that much, I at least got why they liked each other and the movie has a level of believability to it. It's not so much a romance as a drama about a romance. It's not the kind of film that ends with somebody breaking up a wedding on the Eiffel Tower, and, without revealing the ending, we are not sure that they will live happily ever after.
A movie like this lives or dies on its performances, and Hawke and Delpy are about perfect in their roles. Jesse is kind of a jerk and Celine is a fundamentally boring person, but Hawke keeps his character from being too obnoxious and Delpy manages to make Celine boring in an interesting way, if you get what I mean.
I was teetering between two and a half or three stars for this film. It's good at what it does, but it's not that emotionally compelling or much of an artistic statement (De Sica handled similar material better in his Terminal Station). Where the movie's real value is, in conjuring up the memories of the times that this happened to you. I had two nights like this, neither of which ended with endless romantic bliss, and only one even proceeded to the stage of second date. It's odd, how you can meet a complete stranger, become emotionally intimate with them, then realize (or have them realize) that you don't really have that much in common after all. Except of course for everything you think you want, that must exist in those dark corners of the other person you couldn't see in one evening.
Before Sunrise (1995)