A Pilgrim’s Digression

A young American man, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), meets a young Frenchwoman, Celine (Julie Delpy), on a train to Vienna. Jesse persuades Celine to get off the train and spend the evening with him in Vienna. His flight back to America leaves from Vienna in the morning, so they have just this one night together.

The plot of Before Sunrise is so simple, it almost passes unnoticed amongst the perfect flood of romantic movies that Hollywood has churned out over the years. In fact, I did miss it when it came out in 1995, which is a real shame. My wife and I had just begun dating seriously in 1995, and I don’t think I have ever seen a film that captures so well the experience of falling in love.

This movie is distinctly memorable. It is heavily laden with dialogue, but the sentences are so naturally spoken by Delpy and Hawke that I never found the movie boring or tiresome. Based on their performances I would rank this movie as perhaps the very best romantic movie of all time. The only near-equivalent I can think of, in terms of charm and pure sweetness, is Roman Holiday.

What especially makes this movie so perfect is its honest treatment of romance and love. Despite the film’s rather baffling R-rating, there are no passionate, erotic interludes with jazzy saxophone accompaniment. There are just two young people wandering around Vienna, meeting a poet who writes a poem for them based on the word “milkshake”; meeting some young Austrian playwrights who are producing a play about a Brahmin cow–the kind of quirky, first-date types of things that make for nostalgia years afterwards. Most important, this is a film in which two young people are depicted getting to know each other and falling in love, despite acknowledging that after tonight they will never see each other again.

It’s emotionally quite powerful remembering what it felt like to be so intensely curious about another person, to want to know everything about them. Jesse and Celine ask each other questions and in their answers, they reveal themselves to each other. Sometimes they tackle issues that have vexed lovers for centuries. Why does interest fade after awhile? (Celine suggests it doesn’t fade, so much as two people become so used to each to each other that they cease to distinguish between themselves and the beloved anymore, they in fact become deaf and blind to any distinctive features of the other person). If the two of them were to continue to see each other, woud mannerisms and habits reveal themselves that would gradually irritate to the point of a breakup? Why do parents always fuck up their children? Is monogamy really best for humanity?

Each of them have different answers to these questions, and one has a sense that this difference hints at incompatibility. When a palm reader grants Celine a particularly romantic forecast, Jesse mocks the prediction and the fotune teller. His cynical facade wears thin on the viewer and, one suspects, on Celine; but by the end of the film, the facade is mostly gone, and all that is left is his desire to spend the rest of his life with Celine.

They part, agreeing to meet again on the train platform six months in the future. Whether they meet again is not said, but one presumes not: the blurb for the 2004 sequel, Before Sunset, indicates that they do not meet again until ten years later, and in Paris.

Before Sunset is a bittersweet meditation on love. On the one hand, it perfectly captures those first heady moments of meeting someone new, when all the possibilities of passionate love lie ahead. On the other hand, it suggests that maybe those first heady moments are the best part of the affair and we should enjoy the moment while we may.

The latter theme ties this film perceptibly to foreign films I’ve seen recently, most significantly Une Liaison Pornographique. The French seem to have a view of love which denigrates married, committed love, and which elevates the fresh bloom of young, new love. The subtext of such films is that love and passion dies with familiarity. Perhaps this accounts for why American women (or at least one American woman, my wife) tends not to like French Romantic movies: they all seem to be produced by men who want to rationalize infidelity and “new” love.

Before Sunrise is different, in that the director, Richard Linklater, gives us the character of Celine who stands in ironic opposition to Jesse’s cynical “European” attitude towards love. She is idealistic and romantic; Jesse is romantic, too, but only when he allows the facade of cynicism fall. Jesse suggests that men and women are little better than monkeys, seeking out new mating opportunities at every free moment; Celine suggests that love can grow only in firm, committed soil, and that if she and Jesse were to marry, far from eventually detesting his habits and mannerisms, she would love him even more for his quirks and his “pseudo-intellectual stories” that she has heard a hundred times.

Maybe she’s right. Maybe he’s right. I tend to hope she’s right…but I’m an unapologetic romantic. In college, I strolled around campus with a copy of Shelley’s poetical works in my backpack, not merely to impress girls but because I liked his poetry and felt the same kind of passion about ideas and beauty that he wrote about. Shelley did not exactly live up to his beliefs; he was more a Jesse in practice than a Celine. But he had the idealism thing in spades. So does Celine, and so does this film, Before Sunrise.