Before Sunrise

Let’s start with a confession: Until it became the most requested film here at Story24, I had never seen Before Sunrise. I never had any intention of seeing it. It felt a little too close to home.

Before Sunrise premiered five years after my own long European misadventure, and with Ethan Hawke being near to five years younger than I am, the whole idea felt an awful lot like looking into a mirror — and that was the last thing I wanted to do.

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy those times. As difficult and as ugly and occasionally violent as things sometimes got, I’ve always held those years close as precious and golden. I didn’t want my own memories tainted by someone else’s fantasies. But what is it that Jesse says?

People have these romantic projections they put on everything, you know, that’s not based on any kind of reality.

Maybe it’s because I was young. Everyone thinks the world was better when they were young. But there was something about being lost and aimless in Europe before cellphones and apps and debit cards. We stashed our traveler’s checks in the bottoms of our packs and we slept on our packs so they wouldn’t get stolen. We hiked and hitchhiked with no idea where we would end up at the end of the day, catching rides on tractors and sleeping under bridges and in caves. We tore out pages from our outdated Let’s Go guides and shared them with passing new friends headed to where we’d already been. Maps were made of paper and so were books, and we always carried at least one of each.

What are you reading?

And so that first scene on the train with Jesse and Céline almost took my breath away. How many times had I lived that moment? Me with the Le Carré I’d picked up at that English-language newsstand in the south of France, or that first Murakami I discovered at the old bookshop on Charing Cross Road — or Tom McGuane, how did it take traveling halfway around the world to find out about that homegrown Bushwhacked Piano?

I remember one rainy afternoon in Dublin, reading Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God in a damp hostel lobby. Uta from Hamburg wrote the text of Desiderata into the margins of my book, the ink bleeding from her pen onto the moist paper. It still has a place on my bookshelf today, dry now, bent from all the miles.

Was Uta my Céline? I promised to meet her in Hamburg but never did. Or was it Anna from Brussels in Naples? Or Pauline from P.E.I. in London, walking hand-in-hand through Hyde Park after midnight?

Yes, Pauline. It’s always Pauline, it’s always London.

Romantic Projections.

My other thought watching Before Sunrise for the first time is this: What were you people thinking, asking me to analyze the structure of this movie? This feels like some sadistic challenge. I'm really not in the mood.

I could put a structure onto this if I really tried. I could find an inciting incident and maybe some turning points and an act break or two. I could call the countdown to Jesse’s flight or Céline’s morning train a ticking clock. We could consider the will-they/won’t-they tension of whether they’ll ever have sex. But all that seems beside the point.

This is a film where dialogue and conversation is structure. We watch because we’re interested in the characters and what they have to say to each other, not because they’re trying to pull off a heist or stop a bomb or solve a murder. This is low-stakes stuff. But it’s also relatable stuff — not just to me because of the time and place, but to anyone who’s ever met someone they liked.

If there’s any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something.

There are moments that we can think of as plot: There’s Céline's decision to join Jesse in Vienna. There’s the first kiss at the Prater. There’s the first fight, interrupted, and the sex, implied. And there’s that last-minute change of heart, the agreement to meet again.

But this is also just a leisurely, picturesque stroll with a pair of decent, well-intentioned people who are finding their way in the world.

I’m going to take your picture. So I never forget you — or all this.

Even without any plot to speak of, there are a number of highly memorable moments. The scene in the record store listening booth would be a standout in any romantic story, the two standing silently side by side, taking turns looking at one another. I also loved when Céline talks about finding God in the spaces between people, and then we cut to the café, table to table, with the camera centering that space in every conversation. And who could forget the funny Austrians — is that an oxymoron?

I am the cow, and the cow's a bit weird.

Well, I guess Jesse and Céline could forget them.

They had something else in mind.

I guess this is it, no?

Double Feature Suggestion

• You might want to move on to Before Sunset and Before Midnight. I haven’t done that yet, but I will. I bought the box set for this story, but I wanted to write it without any knowledge of what happens in the sequels.
• My recommendation, though, is Krzysztof Kieslowski’s White, which came out in 1994, not long before Before Sunrise. Watch this one to see how maybe it’s not such a great idea to marry Julie Delpy after all.

Screenplay Link

• The screenplay for Before Sunrise is only 73 pages long, and the dialogue differs quite a bit from the film. You can see how it was used as a framework for improvisation.

The years shall run like rabbits.

The author, ca. 1989.

Miss July, 1978

Her name wasn’t Krystal. Her name was Karen.

Comments

Join to Comment

Join Now or Log In

Read More

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind	The Limey	Moonrise Kingdom
John Wick	Election	The Apartment