“The film’s charm lies in the balance between poetry and the everyday”: Before Sunrise reviewed in 1995

Like Whit Stillman’s Barcelona, Before Sunrise was backed by Castle Rock, and the two films also share their basic premise: young Americans broaden their minds through encounters with European women in European Cities. In fact, the preppy American overheard in Before Sunrise complaining about the decadence of European’ culture as exemplified by poor service in cafes could have strayed in from a Stillman film. On a more general level, though, the two films seem to symbolise a return to European cinema amongst a new generation of American film-makers (Linklater joins Hal Hartley, Little Odessa’s James Gray, and, at least in terms of his ongoing Godard fixation, Quentin Tarantino). 

With its young lovers who talk at length about whether they’ll go to bed together, but never actually do, Before Sunrise recalls Eric Rohmer, while naming the two characters Celine and Jesse is surely a nod to Jacques Rivette. By Rohmer’s standards, Celine and Jesse’s marathon conversation may lack philosophical rigour, but it does touch upon a comprehensive range of half-baked twentysomething concerns of the 1990s. On the subject of reincarnation, for instance, Jesse wonders how there are enough souls to go round if there are more people alive now than ever before. Meanwhile Celine, the daughter of a 1968 radical turned successful architect, worries that the media are trying to control our minds, and thinks feminism was invented by men so they could sleep around more.

Ideas like these could have come straight out of Slacker (1990), but the humour in Before Sunrise is much less wild and flaky; working with a co-writer, Kim Krizan (who acted in both Slacker and 1993’s Dazed And Confused), Linklater has risen to the challenge of creating whole characters rather than walk-on mouthpieces for wacky opinions. With a cast of two as opposed to the large, freewheeling ensembles of his first two films – and classical music on the soundtrack instead of grunge or 70s oldies – Before Sunrise clearly marks a conscious departure for the director. Yet his underlying interests remain the same; when Jesse first meets Celine on the train, he tells her his idea for a programme for cable access television – a year-long series of 365 24-hour realtime video diaries of ordinary people. What he wants to capture, he explains, is “the poetry of everyday life”. Later he finds a soulmate in the riverside poet who offers to write a poem for them using any word they choose – who even manages to make something of Celine’s suggestion, “milkshake”.

This is where the film’s charm lies, in the balance Linklater strikes between poetry and the everyday. The Brief Encounter scenario and some of the situations (the first kiss on the Ferris wheel, drinking wine in the park under a full moon) may be conventionally romantic, but his lovers are refreshingly cynical about love (which, for Jesse, is just “an escape for two people who don’t know how to be alone”). 

Perhaps uniquely for an American film, Before Sunrise is about people who are attracted by each other’s minds rather than simply by looks or that elusive movie concept, “chemistry”. As with Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating, there’s also a sense that Celine and Jesse exist to fuel each other’s imaginary lives. Linklater’s interest in alternative realities, brilliantly encapsulated by the speech he delivers himself in Slacker, is echoed when Jesse first persuades Celine to get off the train, arguing that it will save her from looking back wistfully on missed opportunities in 20 years’ time when her marriage has grown boring. Later in the evening they return to the subject of what they would both be doing if Celine hadn’t got off the train (a reminder, perhaps, of Kieslowski’s Blind Chance (1987), which presents three alternative lives for the hero depending on whether or not he catches a train), while the final shot, of Celine falling asleep on the train, raises the possibility that she may have dreamed the whole thing.

In a conversation piece such as this, much inevitably depends on the actors, and Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy both respond to the looseness of Linklater’s approach with their most engaging performances to date. Hawke’s reactions are very subtle – his expressions in the record shop booth, when Celine subjects him to a fey folk song by Kath Bloom, encapsulate the feelings of a thousand boyfriends forced to listen to their girlfriends’ albums. The often po-faced Delpy, meanwhile, reveals a relaxed comic touch, particularly when imitating the California dude Jesse pretends to ring up.

Despite the considerable charm of the actors, however, Before Sunrise ultimately stretches itself a little too thin. It’s disappointing that the characters never interact with the city; Vienna like Austin, Texas certainly has a thriving cafe culture, but beyond that any other European capital would have done as well. With no conflict to keep Celine and Jesse apart beyond their own whimsical decision never to meet again, the conversation/walk/conversation format does get repetitive. But that only makes the film that much more convincing as an evocation of the first, tentative steps in any relationship, and of the aimless wandering in European cities that is now a youthful rite of passage for the English and American middle classes. 

► Before Sunrise returns to UK cinemas on 31 January.