Before Sunrise (1995)
My wife queued it up last night and while I was somewhat reluctant to watch it and fully expected to fall asleep before it ended, it was a beautiful film.
Part of a trilogy where each film is released about nine years apart with the same main characters, this is the first: Ethan Hawke meets Julie Delpy on a train from Budapest to Paris, but Delpy's character decides to spend a day with Hawke's character in Vienna, which is where Hawke's character has to take a flight on the next day.
It's a slow-moving film of mostly dialogue between the two, but the screenplay is intertwined with enough tension, humor, existentialism and awkward early 20-something flirting that it keeps interesting without seeming preachy or [yawn]. Beautifully shot film too w/ pretty mix of city and countryside landscapes.
I'm interested in finishing the trilogy.
I saw "Before Sunrise" for the first time last year. I wrote this review about it on the Boneyard.
<Before Sunrise (1995) - This romance film was directed by Richard Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Hawke is an American on vacation in Europe, and Delpy plays a French woman. They meet on a Eurail train, and quickly develop a liking for each other. Hawke is flying back to the USA the next day, so he persuades Delpy to get off the train and spend the rest of the day and night together taking in the the sights in Vienna, where he is flying out of the next day.
Hawke and Delpy carry the movie from start to finish, and develop quite a chemistry together. They are almost in every scene in this movie. The film is basically a bunch of conversations between the two of them, with the occasional kiss thrown in. This movie is pretty much all talk and pretty much nothing else happens, so it certainly won't appeal to everyone.
While not a great film, I did think it was entertaining to some degree, although with all the talking I have to admit that my mind started to wander off from time to time. Still, I stuck with it to the end. As I indicated before, I would guess there are a number of people out there who would not be able to stick with this movie from start to finish.
By the way, Linklater directed one of our favorite films of the last 15 years, "Bernie".>