Before Sunrise

{4/5} “Think of it like this: jump ahead, ten, twenty years, okay, and you’re married. Only your marriage doesn’t have that same energy that it used to have, y’know. You start to blame your husband. You start to think about all those guys you’ve met in your life and what might have happened if you’d picked up with one of them, right? Well, I’m one of those guys.”

Jesse and Celine meet on a train in Europe. They have a pleasant conversation, and when they get to Jesse’s stop, Vienna, he makes a proposal: that she spend the rest of the day with him, until sunrise when he has to get on a plane. She agrees. They spend the rest of the day visiting the sights and getting to know each other.

Before Sunrise was released in 1995.

As in Waking Life most of the movie is dialogue — there’s not much plot. As conversations go it’s pretty interesting, but it’s very tough to base a movie on a conversation. They talk about all sorts of things, many of them philosophical. The romance is certainly believable, but the story didn’t grab me quite as much as I would have liked.

They manage to visit a fair number of places in Vienna. I recognized a few from my visit to that city.

Ethan Hawke (Dead Poets Society, Gattaca) plays Jesse and Julie Delpy (Broken Flowers, 2 Days in Paris) plays Celine.

The movie was directed by Richard Linklater (School of Rock).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2012 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Reviews of movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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