Before Sunrise (1995)
Directed by Richard Linklater
An unexpected meeting on a train leads two travelers to spend an evening wandering through Vienna. As the night unfolds, they share stories and conversations about life and love, exploring new ideas while a quiet intimacy grows between them, knowing it may be their only night together.
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5 films that influenced Before Sunrise
What critics say influenced Before Sunrise
Meanwhile Jesse – the American drifter played by Hawke – is all strained swagger, if not exactly a Breathless-style antihero then at least someone who’s seen Jean-Luc Godard’s films in a cinema-appreciation class.
And I liked their first kiss, on the same ferris wheel used in " The Third Man ," so much I didn't mind that they didn't know Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten had been there before them.
You can think of this as "My Dinner with Andre" with the addition of sexual tension and the subtraction of two lifetimes of experience.
But if this scripted literal "conversation piece" by and between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory made for a convenient punchline, a shorthand for artistic snobbery, it was also acutely self-aware and just as much thought-provoking, offering a progressive cinematic paradigm that would later sustain pictures like Richard Linklater's Before series (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight).
This is the talkiest film since Whit Stillman's Barcelona, and hopefully it signals a trend that we'll be hearing more interesting dialogue between men and women on the screen.
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And Richard Linklater, who has done conversation movies like the teen gem "Dazed and Confused" and "Slacker," really likes Vienna, and gives the whole land a romantic and interesting view.
After stashing their bags at the station, the two meander around the city and, initially, from the way they bump into colorful eccentrics along the way -- like the actor who plays a cow in an avant-garde theater piece -- it looks as if Linklater might simply be content to apply the same loose, free-associative style he unveiled in "Slacker" to an Old World setting -- a sort of "Slackers in Europe."
As in his previous films, Slacker and Dazed and Confused he still maintains a great attentiveness to characters and the influence of time, but with Before Sunrise his focus begins to include some larger human issues.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are a delightful couple in the witty, low-budget production "Before Sunrise," and the third effort by young filmmaker Richard Linklater ("Slacker," "Dazed and Confused") bubbles with old-fashioned cinematic romance, while still managing to stay firmly in the '90s.
Richard Linklater ("Slacker"/"Dazed And Confused") directs and writes (co-written with Kim Krizan) a brilliant two character romantic comedy.
"Before Sunrise," the newest film by the director of "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused," is filled with hope and optimism.