Jesse: So listen, so here's the deal. This is what we should do. You should get off the train with me here in Vienna, and come check out the capital.
Celine: What?
Jesse: Come on. It'll be fun. Come on.
Celine: What would we do?
Jesse: Umm, I don't know.
Celine: What?
Jesse: Come on. It'll be fun. Come on.
Celine: What would we do?
Jesse: Umm, I don't know.
Before Sunrise is a romantic drama from 1995, and one of the early works of director Richard Linklater. It's notable for being a romance film that contains next to no Love Tropes (or at least, very few straight examples thereof), letting the romance develop through philosophical and increasingly intimate conversation. It stars Ethan Hawke as Jesse, an American tourist travelling to Vienna to catch his flight home, and Julie Delpy as Celine, a French university student on her way home to Paris. They meet briefly on the train and are just making a connection when the train arrives in Vienna and Jesse has to disembark. Not wanting to leave one another's company just yet, they decide to spend the day and night together, knowing that in the morning Jesse has to catch his flight and Celine has to get back on the train. They spend their time together exploring Vienna and talking about life, the universe and the dichotomy between relationships, love and sex, and all with the thought hanging over them of what will happen when morning comes.
Before Sunrise contains examples of the following tropes:
- Based on a True Story: Richard Linklater once spent the night wandering around Philadelphia with a woman named Amy.
- Brief Accent Imitation: When they're asking each other questions, Jesse does a German accent at one point. Later, when they're pretending to call their respective best friends, Celine briefly does an American accent.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Celine mentions at the beginning of the film that her grandmother is the reason why she's travelling. In Before Sunset, it's revealed that the sudden death of Celine's grandmother is why she misses their scheduled reunion six months later.
- Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Everything that's going to happen in the film is laid out in the first ten minutes.
- Falling-in-Love Montage: Averted. The film revels in the kind of details that would normally be skipped over in these kinds of montages.
- Ferris Wheel Date Moment: Jesse and Celine share their first kiss atop the Wiener Riesenrad, one of the largest Ferris wheels in the world.
- Hero of Another Story: When Jesse and Celine go to the cafe, the audience is treated to a two minute montage of people sitting around tables in pairs or small groups (including the actors from earlier), all engaged in deep conversation just like our protagonists have been all film. One gets the impression that we could've followed any of these other people out of the cafe and seen their journeys instead (as in Linklater's earlier film Slacker), and the end result would have been just as interesting.
- Lap Pillow: Near the end, and in some of the posters.
- Maybe Ever After: They both leave in the morning, just as scheduled, but promise to meet again in six months. In Before Sunset, we learn that Celine missed the appointment and they didn't see each other again for nine years.
- Meet Cute: An annoying couple on the train start loudly arguing, prompting Céline to sit opposite Jesse.
- Montage Out: The film ends with a montage of Jesse and Celine heading to their respective destinations, intercut with shots of the places in Vienna that they visited.
- The Mountains of Illinois: Dialogue in the film makes it clear that the train the two meet on was traveling west, from Budapest to Vienna. Yet the landscape outside the train is rolling and almost hilly in some places, more consistent with what you'd see traveling west from Vienna, in the direction of Salzburg and the Alps—what we'd see if they'd stayed on the train instead of getting off (The actual terrain between the two cities is mostly open plain, which wouldn't have made as nice a backdrop for their meeting).
- Reality Has No Subtitles: As neither Jesse nor Celine speak German, none of it is translated, including the arguing couple at the beginning (they're each accusing the other of being an alcoholic). In fact, Jesse's first line to Celine is asking if she knows what they were arguing about.
- Shout-Out:
- There are subtle references to Ulysses and James Joyce. Jesse and Celine's time together mirrors that of Joyce and his future wife's first outing, when they spent a day and night walking around and exploring Dublin. Both took place on the 16th of June (Bloomsday), which Joyce later made the date on which Ulysses was set. And both have scenes set in a cemetery where one character feels the pressure of their own mortality.
- The Ferris Wheel scene (where Celine and Jesse have their First Kiss) is where a famous scene from The Third Man took place.
- Train-Station Goodbye: When Celine has to get on the train at the end of the movie, she and Jesse both admit they don't want to leave the other and agree to meet there again in six months.
- Walk and Talk: About eighty percent of the movie.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: When they first get off the train, Celine and Jesse run across a couple of actors who invite them to see a play they're in. They don't end up going to see the play, though Celine and Jesse do end up lampshading it later when they realize they didn't go.
- Will They or Won't They?: Unlike most examples of the trope, the only real obstacle (besides the characters themselves) is time.
- Television Geography/Film: Many of the locations that are presented as being close to each other are not. For example, the record store is nowhere near the tram station where the couple gets off before. The cemetery is presented as being a moderate tram ride from the center, while it is far out in the middle of nowhere. Arena nightclub is quite a ways from the locations before and after. And so on …
