Before Sunrise (1995) Before Sunrise (1995)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Before Sunrise) | Backbeats (Before Sunrise)

Quick Facts

  • Director: Richard Linklater
  • Screenplay: Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan
  • Starring: Ethan Hawke (Jesse), Julie Delpy (Céline)
  • Cinematography: Lee Daniel
  • Editor: Sandra Adair
  • Runtime: 101 minutes
  • Release Date: January 27, 1995 (US)
  • Setting: Vienna, Austria — a single overnight, roughly fourteen hours from train arrival to morning departure
  • Distributor: Columbia Pictures
  • Sequels: Before Sunset (2004), Before Midnight (2013)

Overview

An American man and a French woman meet on a Eurail train when an arguing married couple drives Céline to switch seats.b1 b2 Jesse, on his way to Vienna to catch a cheap flight home, persuades Céline to leave the train with him and spend the night walking the city before her morning train to Paris.b6 The film follows them through Vienna's bars, parks, bridges, cafés, and dawn streets — the Prater Ferris wheel,b13 the listening booth at a record store,b11 a cemetery,b12 a riverbank,b30 the bar with the pinball machineb23 b25 — until they part at the Westbahnhof at sunrise, having agreed to meet again in six months without exchanging phone numbers or addresses.b37 The third character is the time horizon itself: Linklater stages a relationship that has been told from the start it has fourteen hours, and the film's structural pressure comes from how the couple metabolizes that fact across the night.