Before Sunrise

This is a romantic film trilogy by Richard Linklater.

Watching the film Before Sunrise. Great dialogue so far. Feels like an adventure.

First steps in Vienna, they feel awkward. And then a couple of actors invites them to a play that sounds insane :D

Watching each other in turns, in a small booth. Cemetary for the nameless.

Character reasons as follows: My mother didn’t want me -> I wasn’t meant to be -> Later I started taking pride in it -> Like my life is my own doing -> That I’m crashing the Big Party.

The man is cynical like me. The woman does not like it. Perhaps she knows he is probably right, but that being that sceptical is bad — like closing your eyes from the beauty of the world.

There is a lot of tension in their relationship. They are rather different and disagree on many things. There is awkwardness. There is a time limit, a ticking bomb. Challenges like this make it exciting. You have to make it hard for the characters.

How do you manage a downer ending like the couple breaking when the morning comes? First, there is the ambiguity that they might meet again — they make a promise. This is lampshaded in the beginning of the second film where the man, now an author of a romance novel depicting that night, says the reader can decide what to believe, and that he will refuse to tell what really happened. Another thing to lighten the end was to call attention back to something that was said and implied during the night: Being together makes ordinary things and places seem different in a good way. In the end, we see daylight shots from the places they visited during the night and they seem so different, alien even. So we are led to think that it was the night itself that was important. Regardless of what happened afterwards, that night was real and special. And it was made special by the two being together.

I like how the characters age along the actors in the trilogy. The spacing between the films is the spacing between the events.