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Rating: Take two strangers – a boy and a girl, young, beautiful –, a train to Paris and a German couple on the verge of a loud marital crisis that forces them to sit nearby: you have the ingredients for the most romantic of romantic comedies. Add the screenplay by Richard Linklater, and you get Before Sunrise, a film that becomes a contemporary cult hitting all the right notes to stray from the clichés of the genre.
Before Sunrise captures the roughly twelve hours Jesse and Celine spend together, wandering through the streets of romantic and melancholic Vienna, getting to know each other and falling in love. Actually, they fall in love the moment they meet, or perhaps even before then, because they know they want to fall in love, they are ready to do it, to take the risk of living an adventure that lets them breathe the scent of possibility, of youth, of having no regrets.
Two strangers meet on a train, exchange a few words, they like each other: but the train stops, and one of them has reached their destination, while the other continues the journey. It was nice getting to know each other, there will remain a bittersweet memory, which will leave a smile or maybe it will be forgotten.
But no:
in a parallel world, possibilities come true, and the strangers we briefly encounter during our lives become travel companions and lovers for a night. Until the sun rises, and life resumes its normal course. Before Sunrise is this, a modern Cinderella, or a vampire story. Linklater explores that what if that passes through our minds when an absurd idea presents itself, but which for a moment seems absolutely right, and then we abandon it, because, of course, it is not possible. But if we hadn't abandoned it, then, like Jesse, we would ask Celine to get off with us at the next stop, because then one day, in twenty years or so, when things do not go well and you look back thinking about all the wasted opportunities, you will come back here, to this exact moment, and regret not having done it, not having seized the moment.
The screenplay of Before Sunrise consists mainly of dialogues: starting from when they meet on the train, that of the two protagonists is a long conversation that flows smoothly and quickly, without moments of tension or alternation of registers. They talk about everything: themselves, their families, what they think of the world. The dialogues are beautiful, light but not trivial, the on-screen chemistry is strong (great performances by Hawke and Delpy). It is not a conversation that adds something to the characters or helps them know each other better, in a certain sense, apparently paradoxical: because they already know each other, they already like each other, and their words are suspended in that atmosphere of sweetness and melancholy given by the awareness that dawn will take them away, that everything is like a dream, lasting one night and then vanishing. And so the words are beautiful, they are free, it doesn’t matter what they actually say: they are a lullaby, a fairy tale, the litany of a drunkard, a song whose melody is so beautiful that it overshadows the lyrics.
What remains is the encounter, having lived those hours together. And the hope of seeing each other again, making sure the dream is not just a dream.
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