‘Every couple’s been having this conversation forever.’
Ever since the Lumière brothers’ film of a mail train pulling into La Ciotat station astonished audiences in 1895, cinema has been obsessed with trains. The characters of Before Sunrise decide to step off their train through Europe for a night in a foreign city, and in doing so experience a dream-like whirlwind romance. They must re-embark the next day, of course, but just for the night, their real lives are left at bay. Consciously or not, Richard Linklater’s story might be the ultimate metaphor for a night at the movies.
The characters are Céline (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke); the city is Vienna. Very little else happens by way of plot: the appeal of the film springs from Jesse and Céline’s conversations, which are written and performed so naturally that they have an improvisational lightness, something which ironically takes much careful thought and skill to achieve. What Linklater and co-writer Kim Krizan capture well is the kind of everyday philosophising that a flirtatious couple might really engage in: it’s pseudo-intellectual and occasionally fatuous, maybe, but it rings true, and mostly avoids pretentiousness. Delpy and Hawke make the film a triumph: both are genuinely funny, and the stories they tell each other of their past are often more engaging than the beautiful Viennese architecture surrounding them. Still, I can’t help but wish they had gone to see that play about the cow…
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