Not a romcom, not a romantic drama, but just … a romance, a brief encounter on a train without heartache, a strange and wonderful moment-by-moment miracle that never seems cloying or absurd. Richard Linklater’s film from 1995 is now re-released for its 30th anniversary, a stretch of time that gives us a chance to ponder the characters’ time-travel musings about their future selves. The two sequels Before Sunset (in 2004) and Before Midnight (in 2013) famously reunited the leads and gave us an episodic study of their growing old as a couple welded together by that amazing moment in Vienna; it was an ambitious approach which Linklater brought to its fullest success with his time-lapse portrait Boyhood, which he was working on around the same period.
The goateed and sweetly conceited twentysomething Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, is on a train to Vienna when the smart and beautiful Céline, insouciantly played by Julie Delpy, sits down opposite him and they start talking. Everyone is reading books and even newspapers in 1995, not looking at phones, or posting Instagram selfies – so striking up flirtatious conversations is not quite as difficult, but still a gamble; you can feel Jesse’s heart-thumping nerves as he suggests to Céline that she forget about her plans to go to Paris and instead get off the train with him to hang out in Vienna for 24 hours – with no money for a hotel, literally wandering around with him all night, never revealing their surnames.
Of course, the comical or cynical or commonsense worldview can see a thousand ways in which this would probably or, rather, definitely go wrong. But it doesn’t – and that itself doesn’t seem wrong. They never have a serious row and then make up, there are no serious personal revelations which emerge, nothing that catches either of them in a lie which then demands a cathartic apology and moment of self-knowledge. Before Sunset refuses to conform to screenplay-seminar rules. And they have a long scene up in Vienna’s Riesenrad ferris wheel without at any time mentioning The Third Man.
In fact they just talk … and it isn’t insufferable. I can hardly think of a single film which sports so elegantly with the idea of unresolved sexual tension over such an extended stretch of time. When they are in the record shop listening booth (another amazing period touch), smiling, trying not to catch each other’s glance, you can see the thought in the face of each. Do we kiss? Do we leave it till later? Would kissing now spoil everything? They actually kiss up in the ferris wheel, and then carry on walking and talking down at ground level, with the unresolved sexual tension taken up a notch. Sex al fresco would be a challenge. Again, you can each see each having the same thought: is what we have right now actually better than sex?
It’s a pleasure to notice again, or for the first time, all the incidental details. Jesse has a sister, for example, a character destined to be Céline’s sister-in-law. Maybe Linklater was considering a film about her. It is the lightness of this film which is still charming; Jesse and Céline are free from everything, free from work worries or family cares, but they are also free from the gravity of cause-and-effect, the world of consequences and responsibilities. They bounce and float around the streets of Vienna like astronauts of love.
• Before Sunrise is in UK cinemas from 31 January.
