BEFORE SUNRISE

(January 1995, U.S.)

Let's talk about male fantasies for a moment. Not the obvious sexual kind (which I certainly have my share of), but the kind that involves conversation, beauty and intimate feelings of love...

Imagine you're traveling by train from Budapest and you meet a beautiful young French girl on that train. A conversation is struck purely by chance and before you know it, you've asked her to get off the train with you in Vienna and spend the entire night with you exploring the city before you have to catch a plane the next morning. Understand, you're going to have only one night with this girl. What will happen? Will you be unsure of yourself and permit awkwardness to take over? Will you take a chance by sharing and discussing the most intimate details of your life? Will you share your thoughts, your feelings, your joys, your frustrations, your fears and your regrets with this girl? Will she share all of this with you? What will happen when you inevitably realize that you're falling for this girl? How do you handle this knowing that when morning comes around you're never going to see this girl again? How do you possibly say good-bye to this girl when you're struggling with the pain you feel having fallen in love with her in just one night, and knowing that she has fallen in love with you, too? And if the two of you actually go so far as to promise each other that you'll meet again at a train platform in exactly six months, will either of you actually show up?

(Questions, questions, questions! Life and love offer so many damn questions!)

Let's continue the fantasy a little more. As Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke) and Ceiline (played by Julie Delpy) wander the city of Vienna, you'll notice how the weather is perfect all night, everybody they meet is extremely nice, no one in the streets attempts to harrass or rob them in any way and a club bartender is actually willing to give Jesse a bottle of wine for free on the promise that he (Jesse) will send him the money when he returns to the United States. Like I said, FANTASY!

BEFORE SUNRISE is not a big movie at all. It's a simple tale of unexpected love that must depend primarily on dialogue and the cinematography of the city surrounding these two kids. It works. It works with me and it worked very well with audiences and critics at the time of its release. Would it work in today's movie market? Probably not. Most movie audiences don't have the patience for a film that doesn't involve catastrophic explosions or is not a remake of some kind. Hell, a film like BEFORE SUNRISE probably wouldn't even be released by a major studio like Columbia Pictures today. It would likely be an underground independent film directed by someone you never heard of. It's sequel, BEFORE SUNSET (2004) was released by an independent division of Warner Brothers. What does that tell you? Frankly, as popular as the sequel was, it did nothing for me. I liked (even preferred) the ambiguous notion of not knowing whether or not Jesse and Celine would ever see each other again. It's what makes the notion of "lost loves" so intruiging, I guess.

Favorite line or dialogue:

Jesse: "Alright, I have an admittedly insane idea, but if I don't ask you this it's just, uh, you know, it's gonna haunt me the rest of my life."
Celine: "What?"
Jesse: "Um... I want to keep talking to you, y'know. I have no idea what your situation is, but, uh, but I feel like we have some kind of, uh, connection. Right?"
Celine: "Yeah, me, too."
Jesse: "Yeah, right, well, great. So listen, so here's the deal. This is what we should do. You should get off the train with me here in Vienna, and come check out the capital."
Celine: "What?"
Jesse: "Come on. It'll be fun. Come on."
Celine: "What would we do?"
Jesse: "Umm, I don't know. All I know is I have to catch an Austrian Airlines flight tomorrow morning at 9:30 and I don't really have enough money for a hotel, so I was just going to walk around, and it would be a lot more fun if you came with me. And if I turn out to be some kind of psycho, you know, you just get on the next train. Alright, alright. Think of it like this: jump ahead, ten, twenty years, okay, and you're married. Only your marriage doesn't have that same energy that it used to have, y'know. You start to blame your husband. You start to think about all those guys you've met in your life and what might have happened if you'd picked up with one of them, right? Well, I'm one of those guys. That's me y'know, so think of this as time travel, from then, to now, to find out what you're missing out on. See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband to find out that you're not missing out on anything. I'm just as big a loser as he is, totally unmotivated, totally boring, and, uh, you made the right choice, and you're really happy."
Celine: "Let me get my bag."