Before

You’re on the train home to Paris from Budapest. The guy sitting opposite you starts talking to you and he seems nice enough so you chat away for a while. The train pulls into Vienna, it’s the guy’s station, he has to get off, you say your goodbyes and that’s that.

Or so you think.

He reappears, says that it’s such a shame to have only met you and already has to say goodbye. He says that he’d felt a connection between you, maybe you felt it too, so he proffers a crazy suggestion – you get off in Vienna as well and spend the next 12 or so hours with him before he catches his plane home.

What do you do? Do you say your goodbyes and put it down to being a nice moment on a train or do you get off the train and spend 12 hours walk around Vienna with a complete stranger who could be an axe-murderer?

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This is the premise of Before Sunrise and if the first option had been chosen then it could have been a very different film indeed! We know why Jesse started the conversation with Celine, it was Julie Delphy, anyone with eyes in his head would try to start a conversation with her, I don’t normally go for blondes myself but she’s a worthy exception.

But why did Celine get off the train with Jesse?

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When I first saw the film, I just loved it, it was so simple, just two people talking, no explosions, no big over the top romance, just two people, getting to know each other, talking rubbish, passing the time. I think it also worked because I could identify with the characters and how they talked, I was the same age as them, at the same stage in my life, it was all so normal, these people could have been my friends.

As the years passed, the film didn’t really resonate with me, I had changed, gotten older and the characters stayed the same, talking the same rubbish, they weren’t my friends anymore, it was like losing friends, discovering that we had nothing in common, we, like the characters in the film had shared a moment but now it’s passed….

And then when it’s time to part, do you just leave things like that, it was a perfect moment, never to be repeated, never to see each other again, or do you try to meet and risk ruining something special?