Before Sunrise

365 Films

Entry #47

Before Sunrise (1995)

Directed by Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise appears to have become as much of an aberration as the central duo’s coupling that the film depicts.  The film begins as a conversation on a train between two strangers and (as in the ensuing story and its follow up, Before Sunrise, followed by the soon to be released Before Midnight), manages to be about the entirety of life itself.  In typical Linklater style these ideas are communicated through speech and body language instead of the typical cinematic tools to which we have become too easily accustomed.  What’s fascinating about Before Sunrise is the way in which Linklater combines a screenplay predicated entirely on dialogue with a purely observational aesthetic technique.  Which is to say, this very well could be a play but at the same time would lose something were it not cinema.  Ignoring the obvious loss of the Vienna locations in making this story stage bound, I noticed something in revisiting the film that I also feel lends it a totally unique cinematic quality.  The film is not just about what Jesse and Celine say to each other but how they say it and perhaps equally important, what they choose not to say to each other.  One example is a great little moment early in the film when the two are riding a Vienna street car and each is asking the other about their lives.  Hawke does this thing where he attempts to wipe away a few strands of hair from Delpy’s face only to have her turn at the very last minute and make the adjustment herself.  He then spends the rest of the conversation doing everything he can to ignore the overwhelming attraction he feels towards her.  He looks out the window, he tries a little too hard to make eye contact, and he tries his best to make sure she knows he’s listening.  It’s almost as if he has revealed his true self to her in that moment, and his true self is unspeakably in love with her.  In thinking about the rest of Linklater’s work while revisiting Before Sunrise, it has become apparent that an ongoing theme running throughout everything he has done is that of the idealized-self coming into contact with the actual self.  The characters in Linklater’s films are always trying to be or thinking about being their best, but find that the great difficulty of life is putting that into practice.  In Before Sunrise, much is made of how the two leads are acting on borrowed time.  That their chance encounter was never supposed to happen, therefore the night they have together isn’t really happening.  This allows them to treat this freak occurrence in nature with zest and aplomb.  They can be whomever they want in these intervening hours and they can be to each other whomever they want to be as well.  It’s an interesting parallel with how relationships work in that when you meet someone new, it’s almost as if you get a chance to freeze time and assess your life up to that point.  Your partner is not only an impartial observer but also a patient listener.  And really, what more is there to talk about than your past?  It’s how we learn, how we grow, and how we figure out which steps to take for our future.  Before Sunrise makes the point that only by accepting the fact that our true selves are amorphous, combustible, and susceptible to change can we ever really figure out what those true selves were in the first place.