The Cinematheque

“Life is made up of small moments, not big ones, and Linklater has a tremendous sense for the importance of the small … Even if Before Sunset and Before Midnight had never arrived, Before Sunrise feels significant, worthy of the momentous urgent score in [its] opening scene.”

Sheila O’Malley, Movie Mezzanine

Before revealing its open-ended narrative, enchantingly ambiguous development, and perambulatory pace, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise opens with something swift and definitive: the overture of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas, a tale of two mythic lovers, one of whom must depart. Linklater’s film exists in this kind of perfect equilibrium, between certainty and doubt, romantic possibility and guarded rationalism. Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meet as strangers on a European train—she’s reading Bataille, he’s reading Kinski, and their peace is interrupted by the sounds of a warring couple. For the next 24 hours, their attention is unbroken; they walk everywhere and discuss anything—but especially their personal philosophies on death, reincarnation, sex, art, experience, and love, in ways both intimate and avoidant, pretentious and unassuming. The dialogue is effervescent; the film’s tour of Vienna is both charmed and haunted by time’s limits.

Best Director
Berlinale 1995

“More so than any screen romance I know, Before Sunrise records a desperate, joyous urge to inhabit another person’s consciousness … A landmark of modern cinema.”

Kyle Westphal, Cine-File

“It’s well known that Linklater is a self-taught filmmaker. Luckily, this means that no one ever taught him to rely on the clichés and emotional manipulations of most Hollywood romances.”

Erik Syngle, Reverse Shot