by Lindsey Romain, Staff Writer

Jesse and Céline roam across a cobblestone bridge, strangers less stranger by the minute. Vienna, where they’ve found themselves together, is something incantatory by night; black-ink sky, blots of lamplight in the Danube. They walk past a man who wants to write them a poem. They agree, he asks for a word prompt (“Milkshake,” Jesse offers), and he scribbles away. When he reads it aloud, with a poet’s breathy gravity, something sparkles—not physically but ephemerally; in us and in the three of them. The magic of a shared, random moment between two people and this man they’ll never meet again, but who touched something in them all the same, a thumbprint in the center of their inflorescent romance.

Daydream delusion
Limousine eyelash
Oh, baby with your pretty face
Drop a tear in my wine glass
Look at those big eyes
See what you mean to me
Sweet cakes and milkshakes
I am a delusion angel
I am a fantasy parade

“Fantasy parade” could be a subtitle for Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater’s seminal Gen X love story, turning 30 this year. The tale is a simple one: Ethan Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Céline have a chance encounter on a train out of Budapest. He’s an American traveling Europe like a Beat Gen leftover, she’s a French girl headed home from her grandmother’s. They lock eyes on the train and attraction is immediate, we the audience made giddy in a snap. They start a conversation that goes long and suddenly Jesse asks Céline to get off in Vienna and spend a night together, a romantic leap-of-faith. She ponders then agrees, and we’re with them in the City of Music like a fly on a sleeve.

Their odyssey through Vienna feels literary in its small enormity, and purposefully so. By Linklater’s own admission, Before Sunrise shares connective tissue with James Joyces’ masterpiece novel Ulysses. Both are set on June 16, or Bloomsday, a date picked by Joyce to commemorate his first outing with wife Nora Barnacle in 1904. (“Bloomsday” derives its name from Ulysses’ main character, Leopold Bloom.) Jesse’s real name, as he reveals to Céline, is James, another intentional nod to the author. But more than that, both romanticize the ordinary beauty of chance encounters, big and small, the little details of a life in transit, and all that ignites in the subconscious—the philosophical details of the everyday, rendered with the same importance of some event more titanic or newsworthy.

Take, for example, this Stephen Dedalus thought: “We cannot change the world. We cannot even change ourselves. But we can change the way we see things.” Not so dissimilar from Céline’s: “If there's any kind of magic in this world it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares, really? The answer must be in the attempt.” Thoughts that come from the wellspring of simply living, thinking, breathing in the totality of a small moment—and aren’t those the best conditions for exploring our humanic purpose?

There is another unifier in these stories and also their shared predecessor, The Odyssey—Ulysses being an Irishized, ardent homage to Homer’s ancient poem. The novel is broken into chapters that roughly correspond to The Odyssey, with chapter titles like “Telemachus” and “Circe,” its title the Latin translation of the name Odysseus. Just as Before Sunrise and Ulysses share the poem’s avidity for wandering, they also share its underlying, spiritual desire for human connection.

Connection. What a lettered word. That it’s a yearning threaded through centuries means that it is indeed something primal, some celestial earthly need. And how to define it? There are whole categories of human affliction that shadow its meaning and recognizability, make it hard to excavate what it really means to us, what version of it we most long for. In The Odyssey, Odysseus regularly reflects on the connection he craves—and the risk of craving it—finding refuge in figures like Calypso and Circe, who momentarily (and forcefully) satiate his loneliness but who cannot replicate the home, the family, the belonging that’s become, in certain ways, a mirage to him—and yet one he chooses to grasp for all the same.

As he says on Calypso’s island: “Yet, it is true, each day I long for home, long for the sight of home. If some god wrecks me yet again on the wine-dark sea, I will endure it. By now I am used to suffering—I have suffered much, both on the waves and in the fighting. Let this new trial come.” A quote that portents the same reflection of Céline’s, and may in fact be the skeleton key to understanding true connection: that it’s all in the attempt.

Romantics often long for the idea of something happening to them, some shamanic intrusion of self and circumstance, a thunder clap to ignite what’s been resting inside like a plug seeking spark. And circumstance plays a role in all memorable, and even nuclear, encounters, the ones that collectively define our lives. But as these stories tell us, while there is magic in the fleeting things that smack into our day, lasting bonds take effort, risk, dedication, hope. Jesse and Céline meet by chance on a train, but that is merely table setting for the first chapter: his decision to ask her to Vienna and her decision to accept. Odysseus might let any intersection of character in his journey be where he lands and stays, but he chooses to forge his way home, clings to the potential of seeing his wife Penelope, his son Telemachus, his father Laertes, and repairing any holes he left in long absence. Leopold Bloom, unlike Stephen Dedalus, makes intentional leaps to connect with those around him, does not let passive chance dictate his interactions. He performs acts of kindness, attends Paddy Dignam’s funeral despite barely knowing him, knows his wife is having an affair but chooses to love her anyway and nurture their bond instead of letting despair consume him.

Choice defines Before Sunrise and its two sequels, Before Sunset and Before Midnight. Jesse and Céline could go any one direction after meeting, and in the first film leave the next steps to prospective chance. They don’t exchange numbers but instead agree to meet in the same spot six months later; the romanticism of maybe, perhaps, one day. It’s something more appealing when you’re young, when anything seems possible and where “what’s meant to be will be” is like scripture. But in Before Sunset, set nine years later, we learn that life intersected with that necromantic ideal: Céline couldn’t make the meeting due to her grandmother’s funeral, Jesse showed up and got his heart broken. And then other adult things came as they always inevitably do, and their night in Vienna shifted to fantastical memory, the “did that even happen sort of thing?” When they run into each other again—in Paris, at a book signing of Jesse’s for a novel he wrote based on that night—we see them not as transient, soft-eyed youths, but in the sharper contrast of adults. They have adult problems now: he’s a father in a bad marriage, she can’t stay in relationships, has lost her ability to hold onto anything or anyone, which she blames it on Jesse and the high-octane romance they shared those years ago.

But walking through the streets of Paris, they fall back into easy conversation, and even more easily into the comfort of bodies in motion. Perhaps it’s because they view these encounters as one-offs that they open up without force, spill all that philosophy between drags of cigarettes in a café, under the buttery Parisian sun on a ferry. There’s a shared lightness that not only envelops the two in a monostich gaze, but invites us in, too; us yearners. In the end, there’s another choice made—for Jesse to “miss that plane.” Perhaps the most romantic movie ending of all time, an ellipses colored not only by incandescent joy but by the melancholy undercurrents of the weight of this decision: the son and wife back home, the boyfriend away for work, how they might forge a life together as citizens of separate continents. Repercussions that will follow them into Midnight, the trilogy capper, but we’ll leave that be for now—that’s a different subject for a different time.

It is perhaps cliché to link every movie of the past to the ills of today, but then again, isn’t that what all movies are? Chronicles of time, which is by its nature nonlinear—always of then and now and someday. Movies and stories and everything plunged from the human soul are in communion forever, and because of that it’s not hard to think of Before Sunrise (and Ulysses and The Odyssey) as what it means in the present. A present so defined by disruption and decay—politically, ecologically, communally—that the concept of chance meetings and hope and romantic bids feel by contrast unimportant. But oh how contrary—how necessary those things are now more than ever. The world is assembled to bureaucratically divide; we are less powerful and therefore less threatening in isolation than in community. Yet also we are pigeonholed in our various devices, social medias, capitalist self-care scams. We are kept apart by design but tricked to see it as empowerment, this grandstanding love of self identity and self interest as tools of active goodwill. Even the concept of independence is so baked into us that it’s more branding-iron scar than self-affirming care.

And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with self love, self empowerment. But starting and ending there is an amber casing of inopportunity. It is the antithesis of true experience, true love, true meaning. We miss it all without stopping on the bridge for a poem, without going to Paddy Dignam's funeral, without seeking out Eumaeus for food and conversation. We never meet—or lose sight of—our Jesse or Céline, our Leopold or Molly, our Odyssesus or Penelope.

If there’s one lesson to derive from Before Sunrise, it rests in all this; in choice, or at the very least, in the attempt. Choose to find and talk to random people, and choose (or attempt) to love the ones who matter a little more: a stranger on a train, an old friend you once longed for, a new friend for whom you pine, a partner you’re starting to lose to whatever pithy thing you could fix with simple words. Say the words. Ask them to walk through Vienna with you. Fight for them. Come back to them if there’s something repairable. Love them from afar if there’s not. It might not work out, and it may be “almost impossible to succeed.”

But who cares, really?

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