‘Before Sunrise’ is a fantasy, and that’s what makes it so real

By Jacob Skubish

A decade ago I was taught a valuable life lesson by an obnoxious high school senior from the Chicago suburbs. “Life moves pretty fast,” he told me. “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” Perhaps he let you in on this advice, too. The line, of course, comes not from someone I knew in reality but from Ferris Bueller in John Hughes’ 1986 classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Real or not, I remember that piece of wisdom better than I remember most conversations in my life. I don’t think I’m alone in this. Movies communicate the lessons that are difficult to see in the confused passage of our lives, and we praise the movies that seem to have some tidy, profound message about how we ought to live. I might not remember the specifics of the emotionally jumbled heart-to-heart conversations I had with friends in high school, but I will always remember the pithy advice of a fictional high schooler I never really knew.

But there’s a perversity to learning lessons from movies. At the risk of stating the obvious, movies are not real. They’re a projection of reality, intentionally structured with a beginning and an end and characters who learn something in between. Meanwhile, our lives are just kind of happening, all the time, and we’re lucky if we can learn anything at all. That inconsistency is why we find movies so comforting, but also why it can be so difficult to apply their lessons to the messiness of existence.

Richard Linklater may be the director more than any other who is lauded for transcending this limitation: scour reviews of his films and you’ll find the common refrain that his stories, and the conversations within them, feel like reality. In Roger Ebert’s 1995 review of Linklater’s Before Sunrise, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this week, he praised the film by saying, “Before Sunrise is so much like real life—like a documentary with an invisible camera—that I found myself remembering real conversations I had experienced with more or less the same words.”

With all due respect to the greatest film critic of all time, this is hogwash. The circumstances of Before Sunrise, in which an American man named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a French woman named Céline (Julie Delpy) meet on a train and spend a day together in Vienna before returning to their home countries, is a feasible real-world scenario. But their conversation immediately dives into the folly of love, their ambitions in life, and their relationships with their parents. Just minutes into meeting, Jesse is saying to Céline, “I remember when my mother first told me about death.” The dialogue between Jesse and Céline is captivating, but hardly true to the mundanity of life’s typical conversations.

I say this not because I simply disagree with Ebert but because I think this cinematic artifice is intentional by Linklater, and is the very point of the movie. Linklater knows that movies are unreal, but Before Sunrise suggests that our real lives are filled with just as much fantasy as the narrative-building of cinema. “People have these romantic projections they put on everything that aren’t based in any kind of reality,” Jesse tells Céline at one point. For Linklater, this is just as true in life as it is behind the camera.

Consider the speech Jesse delivers to Céline at the beginning of the film to convince her to get off the train with him:

Jump ahead, ten, twenty years, okay, and you're married. Only your marriage doesn't have that same energy that it used to have, y'know ...You start to think about all those guys you've met in your life and what might have happened if you'd picked up with one of them, right? Well, I'm one of those guys ... think of this as time travel, from then to now, to find out what you're missing out on. See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband to find out that you're not missing out on anything. I'm just as big a loser as he is, totally unmotivated, totally boring, and you made the right choice, and you're really happy.

Despite Jesse’s complaint that everyone carries romantic projections with them, his very argument that Céline should spend the day with him is rooted in a projection of the future. Céline is happy to indulge in this fantasy with him. She’s charmed if not convinced by his impassioned speech, and the two get off the train and venture into the city together.

The beginning of their time together is spent willfully living inside this fantasy. Neither mentions their inevitable separation, instead trudging forward in cautious flirtation. Jesse is narcissistic, immature, and utterly charming, enamored with his own ideas. He’s playing it casual, but he’s toast from the very beginning, instantly agonizing over Céline’s beauty. Céline is neurotic and self-righteous, determined to change the world despite her pessimism about the future. She’s fierce, hopeful, and empathetic of perfect strangers. Each is falling for the other but can’t quite express it, as seen in the lovely shot inside the record store listening booth.

Even after they finally acknowledge their attraction, Jesse and Céline are unable to recognize the ethereal nature of their night together, in part because neither is able to truly exist within the confines of their life at all. “I always have this strange feeling that I’m this very old woman, laying down, about to die. That my life is just her memories or something,” Céline tells Jesse. “That’s so wild,” he responds. “I always think I’m still this thirteen-year-old boy pretending to live my life, taking notes for when I’ll really have to do it.” She thinks her life is already over; he thinks his hasn’t even begun. It’s no wonder they can’t discuss the present.

Soon thereafter they encounter a poet who offers to write for them, and his prose begins, not accidentally, with the line “Daydream delusion.” Linklater has begun to splinter the facade of timelessness. They eventually start to acknowledge the absurdity of their situation. “I feel like this is some dream world we’re in,” Jesse says.

Despite this recognition, Jesse and Céline still attempt to maintain the fantasy for as long as they can. They agree not to exchange contact information, attempting to confine their romance to these precious hours. “No delusions, no projections,” Jesse says. “We’ll just make tonight great.” But the whole thing is a delusion, and not being able to see that makes it even more so. This is the great tragedy of all Richard Linklater movies, from the irritable teenagers running free in Dazed and Confused to Mason’s life passing by in Boyhood: the beauty of life is in our present interactions, but we inevitably fail to recognize this beauty in the moment.

Jesse and Céline can’t even maintain this only-one-night fantasy, however. Saying goodbye at the train station they are terrified of facing reality and desperately arrange to meet in six months. The pessimists among us know they won’t; the romantics among us know they will. The wisest among us, like Linklater, know it doesn’t really matter.

I always take away something different with each new viewing of Before Sunrise, but on prior viewings I foolishly saw the central question of the film as whether this relationship was a good idea. When I first saw Before Sunrise I overly romanticized this doomed relationship; I identified with Jesse’s earnestness and hoped desperately he and Céline might reunite. On later viewings I felt I was coming to my senses: Jesse is selfish, self-doubting, and pathetically romantic (in the first scene he’s reading a book called “All I Need is Love,” for God’s sake); Céline is neurotic and emotionally closed-off. When Jesse and Céline agreed that if they spent any more time together they’d get sick of each other, I decided they were right. This relationship was a bad idea, and it was a good thing that it had to end.

But watching Before Sunrise again this week I realized neither of these opinions are correct because Jesse and Céline’s romantic compatibility isn’t really the question of the film at all. Céline puts it best as she and Jesse rest in a narrow alleyway in a brief moment of realization: “If there’s any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something,” she says. “I know, it’s almost impossible to succeed. But who cares really? The answer must be in the attempt.”

And for a brief time, she and Jesse were able to conjure this rare sort of magic. Perhaps it would have been a bad idea for them to reconnect later. Perhaps they were being willfully delusional in the moment. But neither of these blunders matters much at all. It was worth it because it was worth it then, in that moment. “Everything is so finite,” Céline says. “But don’t you think that’s what makes our time in specific moments so important?”

I had always believed the tension in Before Sunrise was whether this couple could, and should, end up together. But the real tension is in the contrast between Jesse and Céline’s struggle to see the magic of the moment and the obviousness of this magic to anyone watching it unfold from the outside. I picked up on a lovely moment in the film this time around that I’d never noticed before, when Jesse and Céline go to a bar late at night to try to secure some wine to drink in the park. Jesse charms his way into a bottle, and he and Céline scamper back out into the night. As they go, the bartender watches them lovingly. He can see what we can as the audience: that these two, however foolish they may be, are having the best night of their lives.

It’s a scene representative of Linklater’s philosophy. When I think about a Richard Linklater movie, I hardly think about the individual characters or scenes, but rather the overall feeling of joyful reckless abandon that defines them. His films have a deep belief in humanity, if not the specific humans at the center of his stories. Crucially, Before Sunrise ends with shots of the locations Jesse and Céline visited throughout the night: the boat where they dined over candlelight, the terrace overlooking the busy city streets, the park where they shared a glass of wine and maybe more. In the nakedness of the daylight, you’d think the magic of the previous night would have been washed away from these spaces. But the power of Before Sunrise is that the opposite is true: these places contain a beauty they couldn’t have 24 hours before, because that was where two people shared a genuine connection, if only for a moment.

Before Sunrise contends there is meaning in human connection in spite of how much our lives may be a delusional fantasy. Richard Linklater’s film not only argues for finding joy amidst the absurdity of human existence, but also for finding meaning at the movies. Movies are a false imitation of life. But reality ain’t so real either, and cinema might not be such a bad place to search for the answers. Life truly does move pretty fast. Before Sunrise is a case for stopping to enjoy it, or at least stopping to watch a movie once in a while and figure it all out.