Before Sunrise

Before Sunrise is a near real-time conversation between Jesse and Celine, who meet on a train and then disembark in Vienna to spend the evening on a peripatetic exploration of the city and each other’s perspectives on time, death, and reincarnation. The film is structured by an unlikely duality, starring Ethan Hawke as an American cynic, and Julie Delpy as a French romantic. Using the daily cycle of the sun as a metaphor, Before Sunrise initiated a story that would be completed in director Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004). Together, the two films form a temporal loop that is separated by nearly a decade.