Before Sunrise



"Jesse: 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."

Before Sunrise is a romantic drama from 1995, and one of the early works of director Richard Linklater. It's notable for being a romance film that contains next to no Love Tropes (or at least, very few straight examples of Love Tropes), letting the romance develop through philosophical and increasingly intimate conversation. It stars Ethan Hawke as Jesse, an American tourist travelling to Vienna to catch his flight home, and Julie Delpy as Celine, a French university student on her way home to Paris. They meet briefly on the train and are just making a connection when the train arrives in Vienna and Jesse has to disembark. Not wanting to leave one another's company just yet, they decide to spend the day and night together, knowing that in the morning Jesse has to catch his flight and Celine has to get back on the train. They spend their time together exploring Vienna and talking about life, the universe and the dichotemy between relationships, love and sex, and all with the thought hanging over them of what will happen when morning comes.

It was followed in 2004 by a sequel, Before Sunset, that reunited the director and stars and saw Hawke and Delpy co-write the screenplay with Linklater. Nine years have passed since the first film, and Jesse has immortalised the experience in a best-selling novel. While in Paris on the final leg of his book tour, he's reunited with Celine after she reads the book and comes to see his appearance at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore. They quickly reconnect, and even though Jesse only has a couple of hours before he needs to catch a flight home, they decide to kill time by wandering around Paris. Much like the previous meeting, their conversations are very philosophical and introspective, and they also take the opportunity to catch up on the last nine years of one another's lives and how they remember and feel about the events of the first film.


 * Based on a True Story: Richard Linklater once spent the night wandering around Philadelphia with a woman named Amy.
 * Chekhov's Gunman: Celine mentions at the beginning of the film that her grandmother is the reason why she's travelling.
 * Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Everything that's going to happen in the film is layed out in the first ten minutes.
 * "Falling in Love" Montage: Averted. The film revels in the kind of details that would normally be skipped over in these kinds of montages.
 * Ferris Wheel Date Moment
 * Follow the Leader: Follows in the footsteps of My Dinner with Andre.
 * Hero of Another Story: When Jesse and Celine go to the cafe, the audience is treated to a two minute montage of people sitting around tables in pairs or small groups (including the actors from earlier), all engaged in deep conversation just like our protagonists have been all film. One gets the impression that we could've followed any of these other people out of the cafe and seen their journeys instead, and the end result would have been just as interesting.
 * Lap Pillow: Near the end, and in some of the posters.
 * Maybe Ever After: They both leave in the morning, just as scheduled, but promise to meet again in six months.
 * Meet Cute: An annoying couple on the train start loudly arguing, prompting Céline to sit opposite Jesse.
 * Montage Out: The film ends with a montage of Jesse and Celine heading to their respective destinations, intercut with shots of the places in Vienna that they visited.
 * No Antagonist
 * Seinfeldian Conversation: Well, yeah.
 * Shout-Out: There are subtle references to Ulysses and James Joyce. Jesse and Celine's time together mirrors that of Joyce and his future wife's first outing, when they spent a day and night walking around and exploring Dublin. Both took place on the 16th of June (Bloomsday), which Joyce later amde the date on which Ulysses was set.
 * Train Station Goodbye
 * Walk and Talk: About eighty percent of the movie.
 * Will They or Won't They?: Unlike most examples of the trope, the only real obstacle (besides the characters themselves) is time.


 * Based on a True Story: Unconfirmed. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Linklater, and many critics suggested that (much like Linklater in the first film) the two actors put a lot of their own lives into their characters. For example, critics point to Jesse's monologues about his Happy Marriage Charade and compare them to Ethan Hawke's recently-ended marriage to Uma Thurman.
 * Call Back: Jesse asks if Celine just "plugs in the name" when singing her waltz, much like he suggested the poet just "plugged in the word" in the first film.
 * The Cast Showoff: Julie Delpy is an accomplished solo musician. She not only plays guitar and sings, but she wrote the song that Celine plays for Jesse, "A Waltz for a Night", as well as two others that appear elsewhere in the film
 * Even Better Sequel: YMMV, but many critics thought Before Sunset was superior to the original film and attributed this to how the characters, actors and directors matured over the years, as well as Hawke and Delpy's contribution to the screenplay (which was nominated for an Oscar).
 * Foreshadowing: The opening credits play over a montage of locations that Jesse and Celine will visit during the film, but in reverse order, starting with and working backwards to Shakespeare & Company.
 * Happy Ending Override: A variation, due to the realist depiction of the characters and their lives. The romantic side of both characters has almost completely died in the intervening years, so rather than picking up where they left off, Jesse and Celine put up a pretense before revealing that they've completely messed up their love lives and don't know how to get them back on track.
 * Happy Marriage Charade: Jesse confesses to having one of these.
 * Legendary in the Sequel: Again, a variation. Jesse is now a well-known author, and his latest best-selling work is based on the events of Before Sunrise, meaning that Celine has been immortalised in print.
 * Real Time: This film takes place in the hour-and-a-half following Jesse's appearance at the bookstore.
 * Serenade Your Lover: Another variation. Jesse asks to hear one of Celine's songs, and out of the choice of a song about her cat, a song about her ex-boyfriend and "a waltz", he picks the latter. Naturally, it's a song she wrote about Jesse and the events of the first film.
 * Sequel Gap: Nine years between the first and second films.
 * Sequel Gap: Nine years between the first and second films.