One night in Vienna, and a lifetime of what-ifs

Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995) is the most honest film ever made about the terrifying, electric feeling of meeting someone who makes you want to miss your train.

There is a moment in Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s quietly revolutionary 1995 film, when Jesse turns to Céline on a train somewhere between Budapest and Vienna and asks her to get off with him. He has known her for perhaps forty minutes. He has no good reason to ask. She has no good reason to say yes. And yet the film lives or dies on whether you believe, absolutely and immediately, that she will.

She does. And so does the film.

What follows is one of cinema’s most unlikely achievements: a ninety-minute walk through a city, with two people who have just met, talking. That’s it. No villain. No subplot. No ticking clock except the real one, counting down to Jesse’s early morning flight and the end of something that hasn’t quite become a thing yet.

What the film is actually about

On the surface, Before Sunrise is a love story. Below that surface it is a film about time specifically, about what happens to honesty and desire when you know you have only hours. Jesse and Céline are freed by their deadline. They can say things they wouldn’t say to people they’ll see again. They can be the versions of themselves they most want to be, because tomorrow this is over.

Linklater frames this with an almost radical restraint. The camera follows Jesse and Céline at a respectful distance; sometimes it feels like eavesdropping rather than watching. Vienna itself becomes a character: the Prater’s giant Ferris wheel, the narrow streets of the Innere Stadt, a record shop where they listen to Kath Bloom in a booth barely big enough for one person, let alone two people trying not to look at each other.

“I believe if there’s any kind of God, it wouldn’t be in any of us. Not you or me but just this little space in between." – Céline

The dialogue is the film. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy famously contributed to the screenplay, and you can feel it. These are not movie characters talking. They interrupt. They go off on tangents. They say things they immediately regret or immediately want to take further. They argue about gender and God and astrology and death and whether the idea of a soul makes any sense. And somehow all of it is foreplay.

Why conversation is the most intimate act

Most romantic films earn their emotional climax through a kiss, a confession, or a grand gesture. Before Sunrise earns it through a phone call.

Jesse and Céline stop at a payphone and pretend to call their best friends, describing to each other in the third person, safely, what they actually feel. It is the most inventive scene in the film, and perhaps the most emotionally true. They cannot yet say these things directly. But they can say them this way. And the audience, who have spent ninety minutes watching two people try to be honest with each other, recognise the courage it takes.

Vienna as the third character

It would be a mistake to read Before Sunrise as a film that could be set anywhere. Vienna earns its place in the story. It is a city of enormous, slightly melancholy grandeur: Baroque facades streaked by centuries of weather; the Danube moving quietly in the dark; and graveyards that are also parks where people come to sit and think. It is a city that has seen a great deal of history and has learned to hold it lightly.

Jesse and Céline walk through it the way you only walk through a city when you have nowhere to be and someone you don’t want to stop talking to. Linklater shot on location over eighteen days, and the film has the texture of a real place: the acoustics of stone archways, the particular quality of European street light, and the way a city at 2am belongs to almost no one.

The film’s quiet radicalism

Linklater gave Hawke and Delpy writing credit on the 2004 sequel, Before Sunset, acknowledging how much the characters came from the actors themselves. The trilogy completed by Before Midnight in 2013 is the only film series in history where we watch the same two characters age in real time across eighteen years. That ambition begins here, in a single Vienna night.

The ending that refuses to resolve

The film ends before sunrise, just barely. Jesse and Céline part at the train station with a promise to meet again in six months, at the same spot. No phone numbers. No addresses. The year is 1994, and the internet is not yet the thing it will become. This reunion is either a beautiful act of faith or an impossible one, and the film refuses to tell you which.

The final sequence cuts between the places they visited during the night, empty now; the Ferris wheel, still; and the café chairs, upturned. It is one of cinema’s most quietly devastating endings. The city remembers them. We remember them. Whether they’ll remember to show up in six months is the question the film plants in you and leaves there.

Before Sunrise is thirty years old in 2025, and it has not aged in the way films age. Its clothes are dated. Its payphones are archaeological. But its people, the specific frequency of hope and fear that passes between two people who could become something to each other, are entirely in the present moment. Every moment.

Why it still matters

We live in an era of algorithmic romance apps that filter for compatibility before conversation, profiles curated to pre-sell the self, and love as an optimisation problem. Before Sunrise is the opposite of all of that. Jesse and Céline know almost nothing about each other’s lives. They have no photographs, no mutual friends, no scrollable history. They have only what they say and how they say it and the way the other person listens.

That is, Linklater suggests, enough. More than enough. It might be everything.

“Isn’t everything we do in life a way to be loved a little more?" – Céline

The film ends before we know if the love survives. But it has already shown us something rarer than a love story; it has shown us two people, fully awake to each other, choosing presence over safety. Choosing the conversation over the destination.

The train was going to Vienna. That was never really the point.

Before Sunrise (1995) is directed by Richard Linklater, written by Linklater and Kim Krizan, and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. It is the first film in the Before trilogy, followed by Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013).