I rewatched Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise this week, planning to use it a source for a bibliography I have to write for Uni. It is a risk to return to a film you loved upon first watching it, as the enjoyment can so often be wrapped up in the individual, first-time viewing experience. Seeing it again can, on occasion, take away the magic. Thankfully, truly great films don’t suffer this indignity. And Before Sunrise is a truly great film.
The film is the first of a trilogy, which chronicles the relationship between two people who first meet on a train to Vienna and then two subsequent encounters, all nine years apart. It stars the same actors, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, playing the young lovers through their first meeting, reunion and after they are married and have kids. Linklater directs all three and, along with his Oscar-nominated Boyhood, he has built his reputation as the master of these ambitious and experimental movies. And therefore nearly all of the attention and analysis of the three films that make up the trilogy is centred on their unique, episodic nature. My own Uni essay is based on this very thing. And yet, this can detract from just how brilliant the films are in their own right.
The true genius of the trilogy is that if someone were to watch the films as they were released (in 1995, 2004 and 2013) then that viewer will have grown up at exactly the same rate as the two characters, Jesse and Celine. And as their own priorities and morals and values change, so do those of the characters, so that a relationship is created between viewer and film that is truly a rare and wonderful thing. But for someone that hasn’t had that honour, it is inevitable that one of the films will always produce a greater connection than the other two. And given I’m twenty-three, about the age of Jesse in Sunrise, this is the one that I love the most.
The film takes place around the streets of Vienna, as Jesse and Celine wander semi-aimlessly, more interested in each other than their surroundings, but the setting is crucial to the film’s power. It feels like we too are on a holiday, that we too have escaped for a day, into this foreign land we may never see again. It is of course, unmistakeably, a love story, yet it remains totally devoid of anything resembling cliché or cheesy Hollywood rubbish. The script is authentic and nuanced and the two leads’ chemistry is inevitably fantastic. Where it stands above similar films is in the fact that it so perfectly displays the awkwardness and blind naivety that characterises all young relationships without ever getting lost in it. Perhaps it is the fact we know of the greater, encompassing project that is behind the film, but it certainly possesses a self-aware or self-deprecating quality. You’re never annoyed by their pretentiousness as the film always manages to produce this echo of “Don’t mind them, they’re just kids.”
There is just something so wonderfully fleeting about it all. We see Jesse and Celine meet, spend one night together and then depart. And that’s all we need. The closing montage is a thing of genuine cinematic beauty, a collection of shots of all the places the couple visit. A bench on an empty backstreet, a statue in a square, the Ferris wheel where they had their first kiss, the path down by the Danube etc. All abandoned, as if they had come alive purely for the lovers to enjoy; a romantic idea that perfectly embodies how it feels when you are properly and thoroughly loved up. It may only be the first instalment of a truly momentous trilogy, but standing alone, I would argue Before Sunrise is so much more than an experiment. It is the most accurate and beautiful snapshot of young love ever put to film.
George F Brown 