Not a romcom, not a romantic drama, but just … a romance, a brief encounter on a train without heartache, a strange and wonderful moment-by-moment miracle that never seems cloying or absurd. Richard Linklater’s film from 1995 is now re-released for its 30th anniversary, a stretch of time that gives us a chance to ponder the characters’ time-travel musings about their future selves. The two sequels Before Sunset (in 2004) and Before Midnight (in 2013) famously reunited the leads and gave us an episodic study of their growing old as a couple welded together by that amazing moment in Vienna; it was an ambitious approach which Linklater brought to its fullest success with his time-lapse portrait Boyhood, which he was working on around the same period.
The goateed and sweetly conceited twentysomething Jesse, played by Ethan Hawke, is on a train to Vienna when the smart and beautiful Céline, insouciantly played by Julie Delpy, sits down opposite him and they start talking. Everyone is reading books and even newspapers in 1995, not looking at phones, or posting Instagram selfies – so striking up flirtatious conversations is not quite as difficult, but still a gamble; you can feel Jesse’s heart-thumping nerves as he suggests to Céline that she forget about her plans to go to Paris and instead get off the train with him to hang out in Vienna for 24 hours – with no money for a hotel, literally wandering around with him all night, never revealing their surnames.
