Jesse, an American backpacker, talks a stranger named Celine into leaving a train in Vienna for one night before his flight home.
Richard Linklater's premise is almost nothing: two people walk, talk and slowly test whether a connection made under an expiration date is worth the risk of acting on. The film sets up a specific ache from the opening minutes, that any romance this good is already shadowed by a deadline, and it never lets the audience forget the clock is running.
Linklater based the film on a real night in 1989, when he met a woman named Amy Lehrhaupt in a Philadelphia toy shop and spent hours walking the city with her until dawn. He wrote the screenplay with Kim Krizan, though Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy later said they had shaped dialogue on set even without credit, an informal collaboration that became official when the two actors received full co-writing credit alongside Linklater on the sequels Before Sunset and Before Midnight.
Linklater shoots conversation as choreography, favoring long unbroken Steadicam takes that follow Jesse and Celine through streets, a record shop and a streetcar rather than cutting between reaction shots. The format can look talky and stretched thin on paper, but that same repetition, walk, talk, pause, walk again, is the reason the film reads as more convincing than tidier romances, since it mimics the actual rhythm of a new attraction rather than a scripted one.
Before Sunrise has no violence, no twist and no interest in resolving itself neatly, which makes it exactly suited to a slow evening rather than background viewing. Check current listings on theplot.tv before pressing play, since availability shifts between services.
