Before Sunrise

Richard Linklater, USA 1995, 101 minutes

Despite his huge cult success with Slacker and Dazed And Confused, young director Richard Linklater was accused by many of being unable to focus his attention on any one character for more than a couple of minutes. Both films are excellent, but it is almost infuriating to be introduced to so many entertaining and personable characters, only to say goodbye to them two minutes later when the next one comes along. In Before Sunrise, Linklater shows that he is not just a one trick pony by sticking with just two characters for the entire movie.

The two characters are Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy). They strike up a conversation randomly on a train in Switzerland (she's French and heading home, he's American and `doing Europe'). After a relatively brief chat, he uses what has to be one of the best chat-up lines in history to persuade her to get off the train with him in Vienna and spend the night walking around having the kind of conversations you usually hear in the kitchen at parties at about 3 a.m.

We then see them condense the entire course of a relationship into less than 24 hours, with all the usual landmarks (the initial goo-goo eyes, the first kiss, the first fight, etc.) played out against the sumptuous Viennese backdrop. Hawke is engagingly goofy and Delpy, despite a tendency to overplay the intellectual waif card, is more than a match for him. See it with someone you love. Even better, see it by yourself and pick up a total stranger in the lobby afterwards.

"You won't see another film this year that will have you leaving the cinema so fizzy in the head, so eager to kiss the face off the first person you see" - Premiere

Review by Ben Stephens
Taken from EUFS Programme 1996-97