The Enchantment of Before Sunrise & the Splendor of Love’s Descent – Great

The reason why the Before Sunrise trilogy are some of the best romance movies to exist is because it fully captures the experience of love. From the falling to the yearning, before the mundane comfort and the disillusionment that follows. The trilogy charts the impact of time on relationships, how it shapes our togetherness as well as the cracks it allows to break through.

The entire journey begins with Before Sunrise, with our romantic leads on a train, their paths so separate and distinct, until suddenly there’s a convergence. We call this serendipity, a fated moment that brings two lovers together. Ironically, it is another couple’s marital squabbles that drives Celine to seek comfort in another seat, coincidentally taking the one just beside Jesse, and immediately they both catch the eye of the other.

As the couple’s fight gets louder and louder, Jesse and Celine seek solace in the lounge car, and share a conversation. It’s the stuff of dreams, where they bounce with ease from topic to topic, talking about their travels and even death. They make this connection without even knowing each other’s names. Jesse is the one who takes a leap of faith, asking Celine to explore Vienna with him until his flight the next morning. She accepts, and they get off the train to explore the city.

There’s no plan, no itinerary, just Celine and Jesse flitting from place to place, going wherever their feet take them. It is in enclosed places that we see their attraction and desire for each other. In the tram, Jesse goes to move Celine’s hair away from her face, but chickens out at the last minute. In a record store, the two are crammed closely together in a listening booth, and as the singer on the vinyl croons poetically about desire, Celine and Jesse sneak looks at each other, trying to play it cool because they aren’t sure where the other person stands.

These desires finally culminate in a first kiss moment while they’re on the Prater ferris wheel. But the movie’s not just all cotton candy and rainbows – Celine and Jesse often disagree. When Celine gets her palm read, and the fortune teller tells her wonderful things, Jesse lets his skepticism be known instead of letting her have her stardust. When a man by the river offers to write a poem for them from a selected word they chose, Jesse doesn’t believe that the man conjured the poem authentically.

From their conversations, we start to get a sense of how they look at love. Jesse, whose parents were unwillingly together for many years before separating, looks at love as a romantic projection that eventually falls apart, while Celine, whose parents are still together, is a romantic who believes in the preciousness of falling in love. It is also Celine who allows herself to be vulnerable first, playacting a phone call to her best friend with Jesse, where she admits how she fell for him after their first conversation on the train. She speaks glowingly about him and their connection, and Jesse reciprocates. We understand why he didn’t lay his cards on the table first, because he just wasn’t sure where he stood with her.

Both Celine and Jesse are fresh out of previous relationships, and their meeting does feel like fate, since Jesse admits that he flew all the way to Madrid to see his now ex-girlfriend, and when things didn’t work out, he got a eurail pass, which led to his encounter with Celine. Yet, time’s winged chariot is hovering near them, as the hours tick by and they recognise their finite time together. This is probably the only night they’ll have together. Tomorrow she goes back to Paris, and he returns to America. He’s just been in a long distance relationship that blew up in his face, so how can he do the same song and dance with Celine?

Jesse’s self doubts creep in as well. There’s a desire there to get away from himself, to escape the tedium of his life for a bit. Despite Celine’s profession that she loves this moment she’s sharing with him as they wait for sunrise, he feels that over time she won’t feel the same way. What enchants her now will only bother her later, once she becomes attuned to his mannerisms. But he also feels that being with her has made him feel like someone else. While he doesn’t go into detail as to what exactly that means, I feel that Celine makes him more hopeful, that he can like himself in the moments he spends with her because she likes him. Somehow, without intending to, they’ve discovered something so rare: a mutual connection.

Sometimes I wish I was born a little earlier, so I could watch the series with the full weight of time. I was 6 years old when Before Sunrise came out, so I only knew about it after I heard about Before Sunset. I watched the two films together, with no time in between, which didn’t allow me to experience Before Sunrise the way it was meant to be experienced. We’re supposed to watch Jesse and Celine connect, and then face the unknown. But because I knew about the sequel while watching the first movie, I knew they would see each other again even as they said goodbye. I didn’t get to feel the sorrow of their parting.

What I did get to experience is watch two people fall in love in real time. Yes, I know it’s acting, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Somewhere now, just down the road from where you sit reading this, another couple’s experiencing the same thing. Before Sunrise is a reminder of how beautiful those moments of falling are, memories to hold on to and keep for the rest of our lives.

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