I can’t quite recall how “Before Sunrise” ended up on my film list. I know that I made a concerted effort to represent “Romance” as a genre, as I did last year, when assembling my schedule. I recall certain scenes from the flick being highlighted in film vlogs and its 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes probably steered me closer. For whatever the reason, I am so tremendously glad to have watched this film.
“Before Sunrise” starts with two young adults—Jessie (Ethan Hawk) the American and Céline (Julie Delpy) a Frenchwoman—who meet on a train in Europe and instantly connect. Jessie convinces Céline to get off at the next stop with him and they spend the evening strolling through Vienna before his flight back to America, in the morning. Walking, talking, and interacting with locals, the film shows these two fall in love and then contend with their rapidly approaching separation at dawn.
As a screenwriting study, this film is a perfect case for the “show, don’t tell” theory of filmmaking. Both spoken and silent scenes work to illustrate a simple story about complex feelings. And the spoken scenes are some of the most effective “falling in love” dialogue I’ve seen, thanks in part to input from Hawk and Delpy (who aren’t credited, but contributed to their own spoken words). Though mostly plotless, this film never lost me as an audience member because I instantly began rooting for the young love and felt the conflict of their impending separation.
Film is beautiful in that it opens us up to empathize with human experiences we couldn’t otherwise understand. But other times, film can reconnect us with a part of our own journey. In ways both melodramatic and nuanced, I just clicked with this film. It reminded me of a naive and complicated second of my own life. I suppose that’s the best you can hope for in art.