Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995)

I was too young to see Richard Linklater’s classic 1990s romance Before Sunrise when it came out in 1995. I probably saw it for the first time a few years later, before knowing what it meant to fall in love and before seeing Vienna, the film’s setting, for myself. It was, at the time, a more-or-less contemporary film about relationships and emotions I looked forward to experiencing. It was about my future.

I saw Before Sunrise again a few days ago, almost thirty years after it was made, having known love, experienced romance and having visited the city of Vienna. This time it was a film about what was (or what could have been), a film about the past: my own and the world’s. Although I had liked it in the 1990s, I liked it more in the 2020s. Watching the two main characters, Jesse and Céline, fall in love in a world so unlike our own, I realized Before Sunrise was always about memory, and therefore nostalgia, a personal recollection of a romance that happened rather than a straight telling of the romance itself; the further we get from 1995, the more nostalgic it becomes.

Before Sunrise could not happen today.

Jesse and Céline, who meet on a train after Céline switches seats, annoyed by the bickering of a nearby couple, converge because of a shared observation of this event. They’re both reading books without being absorbed by them, and put down their books to talk. If Jesse and Céline were on a train today, they both would be using their phones. Céline would not have been annoyed by the bickering older couple because there would not have been one; the man and woman would have escaped into their phones instead of bickering. If that didn’t happen, Céline would have been on her phone so would not have been sufficiently annoyed (bickering being less annoying when you’re on your phone than when reading Bataille) to move, or would have drowned them out using earphones. If, for some reason, the couple did bicker and Céline did change spots, Jesse, on his own phone, would probably not notice Céline; if he did, he would not have noticed the couple bickering, which would have denied him and Céline their conversation starter.

It strikes me that if Before Sunrise happened today, Jesse and Céline would have had a greater chance of meeting other people while on the train, online and perhaps half a world away, than each other. Whether that’s good or bad is up for debate, but it illustrates how much technology, and therefore society, has changed between 1995 and 2023. We currently live in a connected world. Before Sunrise, in its glow of remembered naturalism, is about a past world: one absorbed by the art of making connections. In less than thirty years, activity has become passivity, even as the number of connections we effortlessly have would have been unimaginable to young people on a European train a mere three decades ago. And when they get off the train—they can’t get lost together if they both have Google Maps. They don’t need to ask the locals what to see. What a different encounter. What a different love. What a different film.