Memories of a Sleepless Night - Before Sunrise

Director Richard Linklater is the best example of a specific flavor of 90s indie film. His first film Slacker follows an ensemble of dozens of disaffected Gen-X twenty-somethings, bouncing from character to character in a way that can seem almost laissez-faire in its approach. It’s a film so seemingly basic that writer/director Kevin Smith watched it and thought “this counts??” Its seeming lack of ambition became a template for his own debut, Clerks, in 1994.

Linklater might not have known it at the time, but for his third film he put into motion one of the great stylistic motifs of his career. Before Sunrise is absolutely in the same vein of Slacker. Its conversations seem to go nowhere, but instead of a long meandering relay of characters seizing the narrative for a scene, Linklater keeps the entire focus on the two young 20-somethings at its center. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (July Delpy) meet on a train to Vienna; the two hit it off and decide to spend one sleepless night together wandering through the city. In the morning, Celine gets on her train to Paris while Jesse gets on a plane back to America. Almost certain that they’ll never see each other again, their separation is tearful and intense despite the few hours they’ve spent together. It’s hardly a spoiler to say that over the course of this short span of time, they’ve fallen in love.

If you know this movie, though, you know that’s not the end of the story. Before Sunrise and Before Midnight have followed up with these two, each sequel checking in on Jesse and Celine nine years after the previous film.

For my last semester in high school. my parents gifted me a six-month subscription to Netflix. They might not have known it at the time, but it was one of those gifts that quietly spiraled me off into being a real, proper film nerd, a direct line that can connect that Christmas to this moment now. I quickly looked for recommendations to broaden my knowledge base. Before Sunrise was one of my best friend’s obsessions, so this (and its sequel) was what she demanded I watch. Not every film in that six-month span stands out1 (it was also a lot of television to be honest), but both Before movies left a mark even during a time that was itself already extremely influential. This hit me at a perfect moment, one where I was over the moon to experience these two characters’ stories, let the romance sweep me off my feet, and think about a future where life’s adventures could be as simple yet magical as a sleepless night.

Despite this, this was a one-time watch due to that singular nature. It felt right to keep it in my memory like it would have been for these characters. The last time I saw it was when I was 18. I’m now 36. The gap between that first time and today is about as long as the gap between Before Sunrise and Before Midnight. Seems like a perfect time consider it seriously, as one of the main contenders for my forthcoming list of Top 250 Films.

One night in Vienna

Before Sunrise itself feels like a dream. The twelve-hour span that Jesse and Céline spend together is a whirlwind of time skips. There are moments where Linklater lingers and other moments where he cuts into the future, some time after he last showed these two together. The opening on the train is long and involved, the delicate dance as the two start to circle each other. As they get off the train, there is the awkward electricity of possibility and whatever the next twelve hours hold for them. There’s a brief scene on a bridge where two local actors invite them to their show that night.

Their game on the trolley feels simple enough, but Linklater lingers there. It’s a long scene, constructed from one long take. They begin to ask each other questions, digging into truths and backstories about each other. It starts with Jesse asking Céline about the first time she had sexual feelings. Hard to blame him. He’s a horny 20-something and he’s certainly hoping they’re going to bang it out, obsessed as he is with wanting to sleep with her. She gives a nice long answer, deflecting his advances by discussing the more philosophical underpinnings of something as easily undertaken as sex. When it’s her turn, she flips the script by asking about him ever being in love. He tries to brush it off. In doing so, they start to get to the creamy nougat center at the heart of who they really are. Exposed and vulnerable, Jesse’s prospects of sex feel farther away, and yet there’s a sense that this enriches their situation even more. As it goes, the questions/conversations grow more philosophical rather than superficial. It becomes less about the sexual tension between them than the richness of who they are at their core.

I don’t remember every conversation my partner and I had had on the first night we spent together. We went to dinner and it was good enough (she got the chicken, which was something she’d told me weeks ahead of time; can’t remember what I got), but I couldn’t begin to tell you a single thing we talked about while we waited for the food, while we ate, or even as while the waitress handled everything with the check. In writing this, I asked if she remembered. She said she did not.

What did stick, though, was returning to the hotel. Memory kicked in as I watched my Converse shoes try to avoid the snow building up on the ground, ill-prepared as I was for the snowstorm that had come in (though the rest of my jackety bundle was plenty robust). We hurried, my then-girlfriend needing to go to the bathroom something fierce. But then the two of us got stuck in the elevator for more than an hour. That time burned itself into my brain. Her claustrophobia kicked in. We took a picture of ourselves in the elevator mirror. I felt a responsibility to keep her distracted (entertained) but had to do so without making her laugh. Very challenging. The hotel manager talked to us through the door on… whatever floor we were on (the lobby, probably). After about an hour of waiting, we finally got out. Hot firemen (NYC’s finest) cut open the door and then we had drinks with the manager afterwards. He comped the room and gave us an open bar. Terribly nice of him. I vividly remember the confession I made to him in front of my partner2 and doing a gross ass shot of Triple Sec a few minutes later.

My partner, unfortunately, does not remember the hot firemen. She basically ran past them with the hotel manager, desperate to make it to the bathroom before all her waiting amounted to nothing.

It’s the quality of memory that sears certain moments into the brain. For Jesse & Celine, these are all the moments in the movie. The actors inviting the couple to their show that night is a moment where they form contingency plans to kill time til morning. It’s a moment of quasi-desperation, an out to let them escape the drudgery should the night’s possibilities prove limited. Pretty soon it’s clear they’re not going to need (or even want) any distractions at all. And then it’s all highlights of what they’ll remember after. Of course they remember the walk back to the train, all too slow and all too fast. Their first kiss. Their first admission of how hard this goodbye will be. The practice farewells while on the boat restaurant… The moments between these highlights don’t see don’t imply silence. Because of film’s temporal limitations, Linklater skips over the majority of the night, compressing a fifteen-ish hour span into less than two hours. Those thirteen hours were not without conversation, but those moments were more casual, the bridges that put the two at ease as the love simmers. The breaths between heartbeats.

Those breaths propel them forward into each scene.

When it’s all in retrospect, Celine and Jesse sit on their respective rides that ferry them away from Vienna. Linklater takes that opportunity to cut back to the settings of major moments from earlier. They’re empty now3. It sounds silly and overly sentimental, but it’s an incredible move. As the locations linger, devoid of Jesse and Celine, he invites the audience to put them back into those moments of intimacy, to remember the two there as they were, together. It’s impossible to not do.

It reaches out from the past and brings them not just into the present, but into the future as well. One day, if either of them wind up in Vienna again, those locations might rekindle the lingering embers. Or even a viewer, someone who watched this movie will walk past and remember seeing these two there, remembering the patchwork of memories as that one special night floods back.

Youthful aspirations

In the end, a lot changes in their brief time together. The two go back on their initial promises. The goodbyes they try to get out of the way reveal how much they are both afraid of that final moment. It’s almost like a rehearsal, though neither are emotionally mature enough to recognize that needing to rehearse speaks volumes for their unpreparedness about the agreed-upon inevitable.

They try to find time to meet again, dropping from five years to one year to six months. The plans are slapdash, the two spending their last seconds not with each other but trying to find a dim light as their separate lives stretch off into a darkened infinity. There is neither promise nor guarantee that their roads will intersect again. All they have to do is say fuck it and stay together, but they know it’s so foolish to do so. It’s folly to think that this one night could really have meant to the other what it meant to themselves. Admitting it is too painful to bear.

This film’s strength is in that celebration of young romance. At the time of release, Linklater and screenwriter Kim Krizan were in their early 30s, while Hawke and Delpy were in their mid-20s. This slight age difference adds to the discordance. Hawke and Delpy play their characters with the electricity of brash young people falling in love whereas Krizan and Linklater (with the wisdom of just a few years) see the absurdity of these two treating this brief liaison like it’s the most seismic moment of their lives. Were this a one-off engagement, that would be true. Hell, for nine years it was. But with hindsight, we know the truth: this is their defining moment. They think it might be, but there’s no way they could have known for sure. They probably hope it is. In the absence of proof, however, they try to be responsible for how these things usually go.

Deep down, though, there’s that young, damn-the-consequences part of them that screams that this is the real thing. It just so happens that in this one instance that part is right.

Linklater himself pulled this story from a lived experience. There was a night that he walked around Philadelphia with a young woman named Amy Lehrhaupt. In that stretch, Linklater made memories and established the basis for a film that would be one of the defining highlights of his career. Jesse and Celine’s story is one he’s returned to twice over the following decades. He absolutely did not have to. Either time.

For Lehrhaupt… well… we’ll probably never know what she really thought about the whole thing. How that night affected her will remain a mystery forever. She died in a motorcycle accident before the film came out, about five years after her night with Linklater.

As people who are young, it’s easy for these bright and shiny new objects to have immense gravitational pull. The world hinges on these relationships and the stakes could not be higher.

Occasionem carpe

In college, a close friend really wanted to date me. I’d known her for a few years and we’d gotten closer since high school. Eventually, she got her wish. It was good for a time, but there was always a part in the back of my brain that went through the motions. In the first few months there was one night where we were together and went to a friend’s house. Afterwards by the car I remember laughing, the two of us giddy at the luck of being together. We looked up at the moon and it was a rare moment of perfect clarity where it felt infinite, like this was the right move and I was with the right person. It stands out because that was the clearest moment in the entire relationship. It went on for almost three more years after that.

There was always a sense that the timing was off, that were we later in our lives it might have been better. For me, that almost certainly would have been the case. Neither of us were done cooking, but she wanted to seize the opportunity and “not miss her shot”. Whenever it felt like something was going wrong, it was that and the previously mentioned moment of clarity that came to mind. The former rapidly eclipsed the latter. For her, I don’t fault the move. There is something laudable about her knowing what she wanted and going for it on the chance that it would work. There are plenty of others who’ve been in this situation. Some of them work out, but many more don’t. Ours didn’t, but we miss 100% of the shots we don’t take.

For Jesse and Celine, they don’t seize the opportunity. They look at the future and assume this to be a pit stop on their life’s journey rather than a train they’ll ride together forever. They predict other partners, other adventures, other lives. The oceanic and continental distance between them is an impediment, but if they were both serious in their last moments, maybe six months will pass and they’ll both trust-fall into meeting in Vienna again. Both underestimate the other, not appreciating that their feelings are deeply reciprocal and this isn’t just some chance meeting. The youthful romance means the night is quick and tumultuous. Fireworks. Lack of life experience means they’re too naive to fully appreciate a rare, glorious thing this chance encounter is.

The two do walk away. Their separation at the train station is difficult, but they will survive.

But maybe this is the right call. All relationships feature that first stretch of time, the nonstop thinking and the constant texting/phone calls. Falling in love is a drug, a singular high of human connection. There’s nothing like it. By separating they get all of the euphoria of discovery without the hardship of its maintenance. The two might disagree and duel wits and philosophies, but they don’t fight. The only pain in the entire affair is when they say the goodbye. No matter how much practicing they did, nothing prepares them for the weight of that moment. Their separation is a death, one they can see coming. And yet it is final. In the wake of their grief, all that remains is the memory of the city they’ve both left behind.

As an examination of young love Before Sunrise is celebration and critique, clear-eyed through rose-colored glasses. It is a remarkable achievement in indie film, and that’s treating it within the context of its own existence. That’s not even counting that this is the start of an 18-year journey. This will end up a rich and rewarding trilogy. It will also eventually reveal this relationship is not immune from the pitfalls and challenges of any other, wholly average in its own way. But what it establishes here is the sort of myth and legend that can be all-consuming. The myth springs from Linklater’s perfect premise. The legend is one that can turn images of an empty city into vibrant mental paintings of brief moments in time.

For the next nine years, Jesse and Celine is a one-time, one-night burst of magic and color. It’s a love scar that these two will carry forever and ever. Until that changes, no pairing could ever stand up to the infinite promise of what might have been.

And that’s why when they meet again nine years later, no one involved will stand a chance.

And now the guessing game…

Before Sunrise was not on my Top 100 list from 2022. Not sure if it even wound up in the comparison pot. Heck of an oversight. It’s way too late to change that now.

When doing the final ranking, it’ll be via a “this-or-that” ranking engine. The parameter I typically use to define which to choose is “if conditions were perfect, which would I rather watch right now?” For all that I’ve held this movie up over the last two decades, it isn’t one I feel I need to come back to again and again. The distance between me now and that first time I watched this is the distance between Before Sunrise and Before Midnight. If I weren’t doing this list, I might never have gone back.

And yet, this is different now than it was then. For all the magic and wonder, it’s the immaturity of thinking a relationship could survive purely on infinite, untiring conversation. Life is very different now than it was back in 2007. Back then the romance swept me off my feet. Today, it feels like a gleeful indulgence, intoxicating in its own way. Of course, I’ve lived an equal life since then. I’ve loved and lost, married a partner with whom I’m confident I’ll spend the rest of my life. I fully appreciate the electric excitement of falling in love like this. I’ve also watched Before Sunset and Before Midnight, so I know where the story goes and where these two end up. Going back mostly feels wistful, but in the best of ways.

For all that caveat, though, I’m so glad I watched it again. The fresh eyes made this a much more impressive film and Linklater’s a hell of a director. Who knows? I’m not optimistic it’ll crack the top 100, but… Top 250? There’s honestly a very good chance. I guess we’ll have to see in a few months…

Next time…

From a relationship’s beginnings over the course of one night, we’re going to a relationship’s collapse, reliving, and rebirth… also over the course of one night. Like Before Sunrise, Charlie Kaufman’s trip through memory, relationships, love, and regret is powerful. Only this one is certainly one of the defining films of this century.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Coming next Friday!