Before Sunrise

Richard Linklater's 1995 Before Sunrise has always been a personal favourite of mine, a tear-jerking little movie about young love. And yet, a recent reviewing, the first in easily a decade, exposed a deeper, more philosophical, existential heart, a meandering, nearly maudlin look at what it actually means to be alive as a human being, among other human beings.

If you haven't seen it, you should, but here's a summary. Two cute twenty-somethings, the American boy Jesse and the French girl Celine, meet on a train in Europe. There's an obvious connection, and Jesse makes a brazen appeal: they get off in Vienna and spend the night exploring the city before he gets on a plane bound for America at 9:30 the next morning. She agrees, and the two embark on an epic wander through the city, walking and talking and falling in love... but realizing that what they have is most temporary, and in fear of what happens when the sun finally rises.

On the surface, and admittedly, the way I'd always seen it, Before Sunrise

is something of a 101-minute meet cute, two pretty good but mannered actors ad-libbing a beautiful start to a relationship that's somewhat tragic, but endearingly so. Because they know they're going to have to separate in the morning, and they know that it's likely they'll never see each other again, the proceedings are lent a special kind of emotional punch.

And it's a great movie if you just take it at that level. It's not “realistic” in any way, really, it's more of a play in that it feels fairly stagy and much of its power comes from little moments that are genuine but at the same time seem nearly overtly played. Jesse's hand, casually dipping to brush hair from Celine's face just a moment too late before she turns, or Celine semi-subconsciously nibbling her pinky, “oh God he's so deep” as Jesse oh-so-adorably talks about seeing his dead great-grandmother's ghost in a spray of water from a sprinkler when he was a child. Somehow, these just work, maybe if at some level we wish we were Jesse or Celine and it was a young, goateed, leather-jacketed Ethan Hawke or Julie Delpy with her wide-set eyes, perfect ivory skin and devastating smile that were sitting across from us while we drank a beer on a cafe beside the Danube.

But, on another level, and maybe this comes only from watching it as an experienced (sure?) adult, Before Sunrise is surprisingly layered in terms of theme. Sure, it's a tragic love story, but the tragedy isn't just limited to a banal discussion of “love”. Instead, it's existential, a moment in time worthy of Roy Batty's memories, a long day that summarizes human experience in all its brevity.

One could easily miss this depth while distracted by all the eye-batting and lovely smooching, but as an older viewer it's easier to discern Before Sunrise's sub-textual evocation of the awful pleasure of the passage of time, and impermanence. It's not just the circumstantial aspects of Jesse and Celine's day-long journey, the shortened time-frame lending their relationship an intensity, a rush, it's that said relationship becomes a metaphor for a human life.

Many times throughout the film, and in a lovely, nuanced way, our lovers' conversation dips into discussions of time and finality. The two dance around the subject of the mortality of not only relationships but human beings as a species, never fully conflating the two – perhaps because of their young age – but we, and Linklater, know better. We know that relationships, and people, get old and die.

But we also know, and it's to the film's credit that Jesse and Celine occasionally pick up on this, that it's the very fact that life, and everything connected with life, is mortal... that this mortality is what gives life meaning. Celine is somewhat stereotypically afraid of death, and it's obvious that this French existentialist bent is somewhat being balanced by Jesse's American gumption, and it's telling that it's actually he's the one who cracks first when the two are faced with finally coming to grips with the thought that maybe they should let things play out as if they'll never see each other again. She's the old world, he's the new one, a surprisingly effective dichotomy that almost plays out like the dual nature of ourselves as humans.

Most interestingly, and inspiringly, Before Sunrise absolutely offers an antidote for this bleak fear... connection. In perhaps the film's most important scene, one that takes place in a small back alley, the two sitting on pallets, somewhat exhausted, Celine notes that maybe, just maybe, if God exists, he doesn't exist up there, or in you or I... but in that space between you and I, in the moments where two egos meet and decide that hey, maybe you mean as much to me as I do to myself.

It's a stunning moment, one easily lost amidst the cutesiness of the rest of the proceedings, and I'd almost like to think it's enough to overcome the film's very last moments of nearly frenzied panic. It's telling that the editing, which usually follows our lovers constantly, stopping only for the occasional montage, occasionally cuts out at key moments such as when they might have sex, or at the midst of certain very important discussions... and the film itself ends on a curiously open-ended note that absolutely begs for hope but most likely will have to suffice with melancholy.

It doesn't really matter if Jesse and Celine get together again, because what they had, they had. Closing shots from the morning after of places they'd been only hours earlier, now quiet and sun-dappled, somewhat contradict this optimism, revealing places devoid of humankind, empty chairs and benches. But only somewhat, because those spaces only mean something because of what happened there, and what happened was connection. And connection, if it's God, as Celine said, is thus eternal.