Before Sunrise (1995)

Film: Before Sunrise (1995)
Stars: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
Director: Richard Linklater
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

If we're very lucky in life, we have "the moment."  I'm not talking about the moment where you meet the person that you want to spend the rest of your life with; in fact, it's far better if you don't spend the rest of your life with them from a cinematic vantage point.  What I'm talking about is the moment where life somehow, inexplicably, but totally and completely slows down.  Everything that has happened before or will happen after doesn't matter.  Self help gurus have made this turn-of-phrase sound like bullshit, but you truly live for that moment.  Except you don't even realize it-you might think about it later and understand that that moment was complete and total, unmanufactured bliss.  It wasn't something that you forced meaning onto like a wedding or an engagement-it was something that just sprang up organically.  It was a moment that only you know the true meaning of, that only you can completely understand.  For me, that moment happened one March weekend a few months before I turned 21.  And I never saw anything that quite captured that effervescence, that enchantment on screen until I happened upon Before Sunrise.

To say that I merely loved the film would be a disservice (and totally obvious at this point).  It moved me.  It had the sort of rhythm and feeling that's why I began to love the movies in the first place.  I'm not going to give away much of the plot, because the film, quite frankly, has very little plot on paper.  It's about an American man named Jesse (Hawke) who meets a young French woman named Celine (Delpy) on a train, and they decide to throw caution to the wind and spend one long, sleepless night in Vienna.  During that time, they confess and laugh and eat and drink and kiss and find a connection.

The film seems so organic it's hard to fathom that there was a script behind it (though I'm sure Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan would beg to disagree).  The principle performances are by Delpy and Hawke (the only two named characters in the film), and each one plays their character with a complete understanding.  If either of these two are method actors, it would explain a lot, because you could most definitely feel the lived-in quality of the performances.  Hawke, obviously the more famous of the two at the time, finds in his character this wonderful unsure quality.  I love the way Jesse asks questions that he wants to answer, the way that his intentions of whisking away Celine are so apparent and you can tell when they change throughout the movie.

The film is so honest about what falling in love at first sight can be like, and in particular falling in love on a ticking clock.  Other films have of course captured this effect, and are equally magical: Lost in Translation, Once, and Weekend all come to mind (you ever get dumped by someone, these four movies in rapid succession with a bottle of wine and several bags of M&M's will certainly do the trick).  With Linklater's film, though, I find that the difference is that there's so much knowledge between the two characters.  With the other films (again-BRILLIANT movies, so don't take this as disparaging), the characters are just as much learning about themselves as they are falling in love and meeting their soulmate.  Here, the film is more interested in the amour.  Of course, as you reflect on the film afterwards, you find that the characters have been altered, that they clearly know something more about the person that they are than they did during the opening scene.  That's not the main point, though.  The main point is capturing that moment, the magic of falling in love.  Few films take that time fleshing out one true burst of emotion.  That Before Sunrise is able to capture it and watch it glow is truly incredible.  Critics so abuse the word perfect that I'm loathe to bring it out, ever, but I'm damn tempted right now.

I know that the movie has two critically-acclaimed sequels, one of which is sitting in a Netflix envelope on top of my television (it is taking everything in me not to pop it in right now, but I want Sunrise to get its moment before I switch to Sunset).  As a result, the ending of the film, which leaves us with such a euphoric question of "did they meet again?" will not remain unanswered (to keep some mystery alive, I'll leave my story from the top paragraph open-ended instead).  But this first film will be very difficult to displace as my favorite, as it is, as Celine might say, parfait.