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Sometime in the middle of their waltz through Vienna, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) stop at a kiosk papered with posters and flyers. One of the posters advertises a Seurat exhibition at a museum; unfortunately, the show doesn't open for another week, and the two young strangers have only this night in the city. But that's okay. Celine recognizes the drawing on the poster and talks about why she likes it and what it means to her, just the way someone would if she were in a museum.
This is a moment from Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise. It's a throw-away scene, but also characteristic. Who needs museums, anyway? Linklater's stubborn sense of egalitarianism insists that a poster tacked to a kiosk is perfectly suitable for discussion if a museum is unhandy. Partly that's because Linklater's characters don't need much of a pretext to start talking, but also because this director's accepting personality makes every experience available for glorification and/or documentation--there's even a monologue in Before Sunrise that dreams of a cable channel devoted to 365 days' worth of 24-hour documentaries following peoples' real, unedited lives.
Before Sunrise (which Linklater wrote with Kim Krizan) has a clutch of those experiences, both ordinary and extra-, and like Linklater's Slacker ('90) and Dazed and Confused ('93) it adds up to something worth documenting. This movie's a charmer, and something more. In the same way that Dazed and Confused both fulfilled and undercut the American Graffiti genre of school-days reminiscence, Before Sunrise plays new variations on the holiday romance.
Jesse is an American spending his last day in Europe; in the morning he'll fly back to the U.S. from Vienna. Celine is a graduate student on her way back to Paris and a new school year. On the train from Budapest, they sit in separate sections of a car until a couple's bickering prompts CEline to move to the row opposite Jesse. Thanks to this twist of fate (which, in another twist, CEline later suggests was not entirely fate), they strike up a conversation and when the train arrives in Vienna, Jesse--in a rare, possibly singular moment of action--suggests that Celine join him for the evening (he's out of money, so he can't afford a pension for...