No expectations.

Rating: Null/10 (30 August 2002)

You know how long train travels feel like. Sleeping on a train, the perpetual movement, the sound of it. Then waking up early in the morning and walking down the corridors, seeing the sun rise. You'll never forget the colors of that early morning, or the metallic smell, or the face of someone you passed by, someone you've never seen before but who smiled and said hello.
So here's Jesse with a Rail-Pass traveling Europe by train for some weeks now, on his way to Vienna, his last stop before taking a plane to the States. He meets this french girl, Celine, and they start talking. The film is just so natural that everything feels reasonable and real. And it takes you on that ride so smoothly that you won't see it coming, the pain of that inevitable goodbye.
Before sunrise is the wonderful story of two characters with a bond and no expectations. Because they know right from the start that there's no possibility of a real long term relationship for them, they share things they probably wouldn't share with their friends. It is a romantic picture, but it never falls into postcard-like long shots of Vienna. Instead, it shows you Vienna like you would really experience it if you were there. And it shows you love, not as a packaged easy to consume feeling, but as something that can get inside your life and shake it from the inside out. The choices you make from there, well, they are up to you. And I still wonder what choices Jesse and Celine would have made from there...