Celine and Jesse are two twenty-somethings who meet in a train carriage where people are speaking some incomprehensible language (German), somewhere in the middle of Europe. They cross paths and sparks fly. Jesse, an American, is catching his plane back tomorrow. They have only one night together. You think you know the story already. And in a way you do. What else do young, attractive, intelligent people do in films other than fall for one another? What one remembers, however, is not the plot but the intimate conversations that they share.

Who knew dialogue could be so beautiful? Before Sunrise is nothing more than two people meeting on a train who together wander the streets of Vienna, acting on the romantic imperative that they owe it to their future OAP-selves to be impulsive NOW. Rambling down the baroque streets of Vienna, they talk about Seurat, the male ego, parents, the ghost of grandma and why we
obsess about people we don’t even like that much.

These conversations detail the preoccupations and desires of youth so exquisitely. Celine and Jesse are at that age when every insubstantial thought or pretension is treated with naive sincerity. But they equally express the most well-observed and poignant nuggets of insight, tentative reflections corroborated by the experience of age:

‘Jesse: I kind of see all this love as this escape for two people who don’t know how to be alone. People always talk about how love is this totally unselfish, giving thing, but if you think about it, there’s nothing more selfish.’

But perhaps Before Sunrise is a film that needs to be seen when you’re young. It seems to capture youth so perfectly- our generational rites, our social mores. It is a film that epitomized indie cool in the ‘90s, a dissenting shout against the dour Patrick Swayze years of Hollywood. I saw Before Sunrise during those late GCSE early A-level years. Back then, I identified myself too much with American culture; saw the suburban, passive aggressive frustration of post-war American culture as my own. Encountering Celine and Jesse with their student- like angst and their thoroughly modern dilemma of identity, I saw characters whose personal baggage I wanted to carry too. They had that cool complexity that made them intense.

I identified with their narcissism as well. Celine and Jesse evidently saw their lives in an aestheticized way, saw all their actions in reference to the books they’d read. They always had Baudelaire (or some such guy) in their peripheral vision. Ever wondered what you’re life would be like if it were a Godard film, or if it were as frenetic as the sentences of Kerouac? I think Celine and Jesse were the kind of people who did. They seemed like people who lived in their own constructed version reality. A reality augmented with cutouts hastily torn from a Hitchcock film:

Jesse: I feel like this is, uh, some dream world we’re in, y’know.
Celine: Yeah, it’s so weird. It’s like our time together is just ours. It’s our own creation. It must be like I’m in your dream, and you in mine, or something.
Jesse: And what’s so cool is that this whole evening, all our time together, shouldn’t officially be happening.
Celine: Yeah, I know. Maybe that’s why this feels so otherworldly.

I think if future historians looked back on our ‘modern’ age, this film would be quite representative of what our mindsets were (are?). Both Celine and Jesse are self-interested to the point of vulgarity. All their conversations lead down the alley of their past selves, their present selves, their memories, their past thoughts. And running through all of this is the equally modern ideal of discovering yourself through a significant other. The self, and relationships between ourselves, is king.

For all those sometime sufferers of I-wish-my-life-were-a-novel syndrome, I present the most picturesque moment in the film. As Celine and Jesse wander along a canal, they encounter a ‘Viennese version of a tramp’ who instead of begging writes a poem in exchange for coins, taking as his starting point the spontaneous word that the couple give him. They give him ‘milkshake’:

‘Daydream delusion,
limousine eyelash,
oh, baby with your pretty face,
drop a tear in my wineglass,
look at those big eyes,
see what you mean to me,
sweet cakes and milkshakes,
I am a delusioned angel,
I am a fantasy parade,
I want you to know what I think,
dont want you to guess anymore,
you have no idea where I came from,
we have no idea where we’re going,
launched in life,
like branches in the river,
flowing downstream,
caught in the current,
I’ll carry you, you’ll carry me,
that’s how it could be,
don’t you know me?
don’t you know me by now?’

by Shuchen Xiang