Before Sunrise

Ethan Hawke meets cute French girl Julie Delpy on a train and says hey why don’t you forget whatever French girl stuff you were doing like reading poetry or painting a watercolor of a mime holding a baguette and get off this train with me and we can spend the day hanging out in Vienna. She says sure as long as your wispy-three-musketeer-looking mustache soul patch combination is coming, too.

So they get off and wander around and talk and talk and talk. Ethan Hawke removes his jacket so as to flirt more effectively. They ride a tram around and drink coffee. A gypsy tells their fortune. Two guys try to convince them to come to a play. A guy lounging by a river asks them if they’d donate a few dollars for a poem. If you went to Romantic University and majored in Romance with a minor in soul mates and when you graduated the King of First Dates gave you a copy of Sleepless in Seattle and said, “AS MAGISTRATE OF THE BARONY OF PASSIONATE KISSES, I HEREBY DECLARE YOU….ROMANTIC!” you’d still throw your mortarboard cap to the ground in frustration when you saw Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy drinking wine in a park and talking about feelings on their only night together in Vienna.

This is a Richard Linklater movie so there’s talk about life being a dream or a memory before dying and and strange little meandering conversational turns so it kicks the ass of any dumb old romantic comedy your sorry ass got dragged to see by your girlfriend/dragged your boyfriend to see/drag raced to win a ticket to see/fought a dragon to protect your village.

By the time this movie was over, I felt like I was in love with with both of these 90′s clothes wearing young intellectuals. Made me want to go run along side a train as the love of my life sped away. Come back, only girl I ever had a true connection with! I guess I’ll just go back to my stupid life now. I’ll tell you this much, though- if I was in that situation I’d damn sure be facebooking and twitter following the hell out of that girl after such an amazing night together. I guess back in the 90′s they had to use the Pony Express to communicate with each other, as evidenced by the Ginuwine song “Pony”.

Do people even get to have things like that happen to them any more, where you meet the person you’re supposed to be with and then lose them just as quickly without having to get exposed to all their status updates or tweets until the end of time? Would Ethan Hawke’s character be scrolling through Julie Delpy’s character’s Facebook albums and wondering which friends were exes and getting jealous if this movie had been set in modern times?

Anyway, if you haven’t seen this beautiful movie then you should throw whatever lame DVD you were about to watch in the river, and if you bought a movie to watch on your iPhone throw your iPhone in the river and go Netflix Before Sunrise. Don’t worry about your iPhone, it’s programmed to find its way home to Steve Jobs through the rivers and oceans, riding the current until it catches on his elegant fishing hook, which is tied to his big toe as he sleeps in the shade of his favorite Magnolia tree.

Tagged Before Sunrise, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, movie