Before Sunrise (Richard Linklater, 1995)

Through some mysterious twist of fate, in the last three years since I first saw Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) on the same evening, I’ve seen the sequel something like eight or nine times without revisiting the original even once, the result of this being that, because Sunset has become one of my all-time favorite movies, I began to wrongly suspect that, for all intents and purposes, Sunrise was little more than the charming introduction which allowed Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy to make their real film, an unparalleled and gorgeous exploration on the passage of time. Needless to say, I was sorely mistaken, since it is precisely to the extent that Sunrise is different from its sequel that it can be recognized as a masterpiece on its own right. For one thing, in this film, given that the characters are just beginning to learn about one another, they are not quite as absorbed with their encounter as the reunited lovers of Sunset, so the city of Vienna and its dwellers make their way into their private world in ways that reveal quite a lot about what Linklater and company are up to. I’m referring particularly to the palm reader and the street poet, two characters whose respective scenes wouldn’t be out of place in any number of carefully-conceived romantic works of art, and Linklater lets them play out with beautiful ease and all the emotional weight that they require, but then, in this film so concerned with the nuances of conversation, Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) go on to deconstruct the experience and discuss each other’s reactions. So it’s not as in Waking Life (2001) where we can hear the guy on the bridge with the wild hair talk about Lorca’s advice to dreamers and simply move on to the next sequence, we have to think about the scene’s place in the movie and as a result our own expectations from romance in the real world. It’s a fitting strategy for a film whose protagonists are generally so curious and skeptical. However, this isn’t to say that the film isn’t also achingly romantic; one couldn’t possibly make that claim with all the truly beautiful and intimate moments to be found throughout the Viennese night. All in all, Before Sunrise is more than just a great film. For me it’s an overwhelming experience about what it’s like to be alive in the world; more than that, it’s pure magic.