Before Sunrise (1995) – Auteur
I turn 30 a month from Thursday. I wish I could say that the upcoming milestone has prompted some profound peak summitted by reflection on the passage of time, but the truth is there is nothing I think more about every day of my life than time, with little profundity ever peaked. I am fascinated with the concept of time and what it does to me as it passes, sometimes in the blink of an eye and sometimes seemingly not at all in frozen moments of emotion. I’m fascinated by how I change and how my thoughts expand and how experiences are absorbed, blows weathered, triumphs triumphed all in the same body and mind I have always had but somehow also happening to an entirely different me each time. I am captivated by the constant expansion of my ability to be human in a way that was inconceivable to me yesterday, inexplicable today, and inevitable tomorrow. So, this week we’re going to indulge my introspection by looking at a film that spoke to me in a way few other films ever have by forcing me to specifically reflect ahead of my next milestone on a younger me who had just moved abroad eight years ago.
Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) is, quite possibly, my platonic ideal of cinema. (It’s different for everyone because that’s how art works, this is just mine). It is a stunningly minimalistic film that meanders between monologue and dialogue as the centrepieces, Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), wander Vienna for 18 or so hours, talking and thinking with each other. I am a huge fan of minimalism in films – I think Good Luck to You, Leo Grande (2022) is one of the better films of the 2020s already – because something powerfully beautiful happens when you in the audience are allowed to sit with the curated chemistry of two people exploring each other and the human condition for an extended period of time through carefully chosen words and facial expressions you just don’t get sitting in the audience of a play. Linklater does this very well in the films of his I have seen, and I am eagerly wanting to watch more after this week’s. Despite that admission, the Review Roulette wheel landed on Auteur as our theoretical approach for this week, so instead of focusing on the Before trilogy (Before Sunset, 2004; Before Midnight, 2013) that continues to dip into Jesse’s and Celine’s lives as they intersect in future moments (allegedly – I have not seen them), I am going to construct a different trilogy of Linklater’s films: Dazed and Confused (1993), Before Sunrise (1995), and School of Rock (2003).
If you follow me on Twitter, you know I have a thing for films and tv capturing splices of life. A recent one that I think did this perfectly is Netflix’s 2024 miniseries adaptation One Day each episode of which is a time jump of the two main characters as they stumble through their 20s. An older example that I think captures life and especially the 20th century exquisitely is Same Time, Next Year (1978) in which we see Alan Alda and Ellen Burstyn meeting across several decades at different stages of life, love, and loss. What I find most interesting here is that many films in this category of “minimalist dialogues dealing with the passage of time” are literature or staged plays first and then adapted to the screen, while the three of Linklater’s films I am choosing to focus on are films first and foremost (and admittedly not entirely as minimalist).
What spoke to me most deeply in Before Sunrise was the naïveté of Jesse as a circa-23-year-old travelling in Europe for the first time and with a freshly broken heart. He makes bold declarations on the ambiguity of death that he later contradicts in the most minute way that really only could be noticed by someone who once thought they were original and profound but later realised – in the most loving way possible – that their grand designs on the universe were foolishly superficial at best. If I had seen this film as my own naïve 23-year-old self, I would have eaten it up as the most intelligent musings on life ever screened, but at 29, I am eating it up as the most intelligent reflection on the musings on life ever screened. It’s the inside joke of a person who felt inexplicably unstoppable in their own unknown ignorance only to realise later that allowing life to stop you in your tracks and force a moment of actual honest contemplation is the most humbling and enjoyable of human experiences.
In thinking about that exactly, how I would have felt watching this when I was younger and how I have grown to love that younger version of me in all her beautiful naïveté and excitement for a world she was just starting to explore, it got me thinking about Linklater’s other films. Dazed and Confused was hands down my favourite film as a teenager and I could not explain why no matter how hard I tried. I may have mentioned here that I was not a film person until my PhD really – I had a limited vocabulary to talk about film and a limited scope of films I had seen (and I was not nearly as thoughtful as I have learned to be in the last eight years since realising my own beautiful naïveté). Something kept me coming back to it though, and I think now reflecting back and trying to give meaning to my younger self, it was probably the questions of time and life and the way Linklater captures moments of confident uncertainty.
By confident uncertainty I mean the way Dazed and Confused presents the prospect of the future. The central characters in the film are seniors on their last day of high school trying to celebrate the moment but with this nagging question of what comes next prompted by adults decrying a lack of ambition or promise. One character says, “All I’m saying is if I ever start referring to these as the best days of my life, remind me to kill myself” and another delivers an unexpected monologue on desperately trying to remember that despite what might come next “I did the best that I could while I was stuck in this place.” There’s a confidence that I think I wished I had more of when I was that age and that probably comes for most of us only in this moment of reflection decades or so later when we think back on that sweet naïveté when we were all stuck in that place doing the best we could.
In a similar way, Jesse echoes that feeling but a bit more maturely, knowing what he doesn’t want but giving himself the grace to know he tried his best, when he says in Before Sunrise, “I could never really get excited about other people's ambitions for my life.” Linklater captures these moments of unfounded confidence in the self in the face of endless uncertainty in a way that just feels human and right. It’s never asking too much of the characters or the audience to accept that there’s something to gain from embracing the unknown while simultaneously allowing them to explore the philosophical worldviews they are only just starting to cultivate, no matter how naïve they may seem to an older audience.
Speaking of that cultivation, I think School of Rock completes this trio quite beautifully. While Sunrise is about two people in their early 20s, Dazed is a small group in their late-teens, and School of Rock is about a class of preteens. All three deal in their own ways with these questions of the passage of time and the future but especially about ambition, expectations, and potential. The kids in School of Rock are under immense pressure with full schedules, hard ass teachers, and the crushing weight of a parent’s misguided selfishness disguised as love. They are not allowed to be children until Jack Black’s character takes them to another extreme but teaches them valuable lessons of acceptance of the self, the situation, and most importantly, uncertainty.
Something I say to myself and my loved ones quite often is “not all potential has to be realised”, and I think Linklater ultimately gets to this point in each of these films. Sometimes potential is a curse and the weight of other people’s ambitions for your life without you asking for it, as Jesse says and as the adults of Dazed and School place on their respective teens and preteens. Not realising potential is like having that confidence in uncertainty, knowing the self well enough to know that the “potential” others saw in you might have nothing to do with you at all and is sometimes best left as an embraced unknown. And I think that these three films taken together offer that perspective from and to the central ages within them. The kids in the band begin to question their own autonomy over their education and ambition, the teens cultivate armour against others’ expectations by having confidence in themselves up to that point, and the young travellers admit that they are stumbling through a fraught world with all the beautiful naïveté of someone who can’t afford a hotel room and decides to walk the streets of a foreign city with a stranger until sunrise instead.
Films like these are almost like the Mona Lisa whose eyes follow you and smile changes every time you look; as you age, each viewing of Linklater’s films changes philosophically because you are a new iteration of yourself with an expanded perspective simply from the privilege of having experienced more life. The realness of his characters and the philosophical discussions they have prompt reflection and memories and moments when you felt just as beautifully naïve as them. I think his films are a love letter to the passage of time, the moments of life that I call in my work the “blank spaces” between the lines on a CV and the milestone highlights, moments when life is lived. To be able to use my blank spaces, my downtime to think about these things and watch this art and contemplate my own splices of life is, I think, one of the most beautiful parts of being human, and also maybe almost a bit too meta.
If you have made it this far with me, I salute you. I know how winding and messy this review has come out to be, but I did promise a lack of profundity at the beginning. Besides, I am only just turning 30 in a month and a bit, so I have much more life to live and maybe one day I’ll look back on this review and smile at the beautiful naïveté of my 29-year-old self and her still budding cultivation of an attempt at a philosophical worldview.