By Diya Ahuja, 16 April, 2020
“Before Sunrise is so much like real life — like a documentary with an invisible camera — that I found myself remembering real conversations I had experienced with more or less the same words”.
– Roger Ebert (Chicago Film Critic Association)
Before Sunrise is a 1995 American-Austrian, romance drama film directed by Richard Linklater and written by Linklater and Kim Krizan. The film follows Jesse (Ethan Hawke), a young American man, and Celine (Julie Delpy), a young French woman, who meets on a train and disembark in Vienna, where they spend the night walking around the city and getting to know and falling in love with each other.
This movie was about taking a risk and falling in love with a stranger. As cliche as it sounds, it was inherently romantic in a way where two people connect and talk. They had plenty of time to kill together and all the possibilities to fall in love.
What adds to the plot of this story is the beauty of Vienna. It highlights the romance into ten times of the actual story. This movie is like poetry in itself. It is realistic and overwhelming at the same time. It makes you fall in love with it. It talks about real human connections and how deeply one acknowledges them and this makes it a must-watch.
Jesse and Celine didn’t make the audience feel like they were watching a movie. It looked so real and raw which allowed us to get to know them as we do with the people we meet in real life.
The shades and tints of brown in the movie compliment the views of Vienna and give a very subtle vibe to it. The neutrals set a light tone in the movie because of which, one and a half-hour conversation between Celine and Jesse doesn’t seem long and it makes you focus on the substance of the conversation more.
This film is a work of art and open endings aren’t something usual for art films. The realistic approach of Before Sunrise made people listen to an hour and a half long conversation between Jesse and Celine with keen interest. It felt as if you could relate to it because people do experience this sort of a relationship with someone, at least once in a lifetime.
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