Before Sunrise (1995)

final verdict for: "Before Sunrise" (1995): I picked this up a long time ago, started to watch it, put it back to the box and ignored it for over 5 years. Now I put myself through it.

Ethan Hawke meets Julie Delpy in a train to Vienna and convinces her to spend the night before he leaves to the US together with him in Vienna. Of course it's a love story.

Let's talk about the good things first. The cinematography is really good, perspective and shot arrangement are really well chosen, especially the montage towards the end that recaptures the places of their journey through the night in morning light is really great.

The music is okay, as cheesy as generic as you would expect, but not getting on your nerves, though forgettable.

The characters, however, should have been the movie's greatest element, but it fails horribly at it. In the beginning of the movie the two tell each other that they don't want to be the stereotypical french and american people and all through the movie they try to prove it. But the only thing they do prove in the end is the confirmation. Ethan Hawke is the typical mysterious American youngster on a sould journey through old europe. That topic is about as old as US-american storytelling itself, just ask Henry James about it. Julie Delpie is depicted as exactly what too many people think about french women: easily impressed, mildly esoterical/alternative and rather sophisticated. Also they are very stereotypical in their attitudes. Ethan Hawke is the negative guy, who will whine just about everything. Julie Delpy is so positive, it makes you suffocate and yet so easily influenced that she doesn't seem to have an opinion of her own.

What this leads to is all their talk, and the movie mainly consists of talk, being surface phrasing and pseudo-intellectual/spiritual bullshitting about life and it's purpose and so on. Yabber Yabber. I would have been able to stand this for half an hour, especially since Hawke and Delpy are performing really well and close to real life. But not for 105 minutes.

There is no character development whatsoever, not that I expected this, given the fact that all of this is happening in one night, but with characters so boring and flat it gets unbearable.

In the end, all that's left is a nice portfolio of shots of Vienna in the mid 90's and a hell of a lot boring discussions.

However, if there's one thing the movie makes me curious about is, whether the sequel ("Before Sunset" 2004) is better and where it leads the characters, 9 years after their first encounter.

I am really wondering, where the IMDB-rating of 8.1 comes from, but I am not willing to give this more than 4 out of 10.