30 years ago, ‘Before Sunrise’ was the start of something big

Richard Linklater directed Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in the first of three chapters of a long romance.

Before Sunrise was director Richard Linklater’s third major feature, following Slacker in 1990 and Dazed in Confused in 1993. Arriving shortly after its Sundance debut, Before Sunrise was released in the United States on January 27, 1995, 30 years ago yesterday.

The film was very much locked into its period, and into Gen X. What was more Gen X-coded, after all, was then a guy bumming around Europe on a Eurail pass and trying to make it to the end of his trip without spending any more money? And that’s before the characters visit a record store, and later the sort of nightspot where there’s a pinball machine, foosball table, and an angsty-looking guy playing guitar on stage.

About a year after Reality Bites, Ethan Hawke played a different Gen X archetype, a guy much less hostile, but still, it appears, without a job.

Before Sunrise had a solid concept: Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is an American visiting Europe, who meets a French woman named Celeste (Julie Delpy) on a train to Vienna. Knowing they’re both headed out of town the following morning, they decide on a whim to get off the train together and spend the night walking around Vienna, with the assumption that they’ll probably never see each other again.

The film wouldn’t work if the two characters didn’t have dynamite chemistry, but they do, and so it does. They talk and talk and talk about all sorts of subjects — another thing much associated with mid-1990s cinema — kiss, and (maybe) have sex.