Before Sunrise

I remember her, that sweet smile, the slender figure, the walk in the park on a fall day more than a decade ago.

What I don't remember is her name. I was in college at the time, in a small town, and she was a prospective student coming in for a day or two to see if she liked my college enough to attend. For some reason, I was her guide for the day, showing her around, and in those hours, there was this irresistible connection, a magnet drawing us together.

We talked and laughed as we walked from campus into the streets of that small town, holding hands, my skin tingling with a nice warmth.

Later, however, in the dorm room where she was staying, she asked me about an upperclassman she was interested in, apparently a much more handsome guy than me, who I also knew to be a bit of a ladies man. It was a gut-punch but I smiled anyway. The pain eventually faded, as she did, because she ended up going to another school. I never saw her again.

I thought about that girl as I watched Before Sunrise, the 1994 film by Richard Linklater, the genius behind cult-classic Dazed and Confused.

The movie centered on Jesse and Celine (played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), two strangers who meet on a train destined for Vienna. Jesse is a backpacking American headed to Vienna for his flight back home. And Celine is a French grad student who just got back from visiting her grandmother.

Jesse sparks up a conversation with Celine. The chemistry is undeniable. The connection is there, and when the train stops at Vienna, Jesse invites Celine to accompany him until his flight leaves the next morning.

And so they do, their conversation going from heady to bawdy and everything in between, those moments of laughter interspersed with quiet moments when the two hit that sweet spot of intimacy.

This isn't your typical romantic comedy. Jesse and Celine don't hook up within the first hour of the movie, then break up and finally rush toward each other in some inane climax after realizing they're meant to spend the rest of their lives together.

The connection here is at first intellectual and gradually moves toward romance and there's no guarantee that they will end up together forever at the end.

In fact, they very well may never see each other again.

What I loved about the movie is that the connection isn't purely physical. There's this unexplainable emotional intimacy that develops between the two, some special chemistry drawing the two together and making it hard to let go.

There's a rhythm here, a rapid back and forth marked by pauses and brief and poignant moments of vulnerability. There's joy simply to be in one another's presence, something that I just don't think Facebook-based relationships can replicate (even though I admit to being a Facebook addict in need of Dr. Drew-like intervention).

At the end, Jesse and Celine promise to meet back in Vienna in six months. They never do. We know this, of course, because Richard Linklater decided to make a sequel called, appropriately enough, Before Sunset.

I saw this movie several years ago, way before I ever saw Before Sunrise. It was the rare sequel done years after the original that actually worked in that there's an added emotional tension, a history just surging beneath the surface of the characters' interactions.

Life got in the way and changed Jesse and Celine in surprising ways, but the connection was still there. They pick up where they left off more than a decade earlier, as if they never left each other at the train station at Vienna.

But they did and they can never go back. They have to live with the choices they made. Yet, the scene I loved the most is the ending, where they bask in the moment, an ecstasy of joy of that connection made so many years ago that never went away.

Before Sunrise and its subsequent sequel, I think, reminds us of the importance of searching for the bliss in those connections, even if some may be fleeting. This is where life is. This is where joy is. This is what we will remember when we see our lives coming to an end, and the more we have of them, the richer our lives are.