A good love story

Rating: 8/10 (6 March 2016)

In this first part of the "Before" trilogy, we meet Jesse and Celine. They are both on the train, and both witness a German couple fighting. They decide to go to the lounge area, where they get to know each other better, and after a while, they get out of the train to go explore the city together.
Before I start to review this movie let me say that I had very low expectation, but I got proved wrong. This movie is directed by the director who is called Richard Linklater. He has 'recently' directed the very good movie "Boyhood", which took 12 years to shoot.That movie was well directed, and so was this one. Linklater did a good job, again. The cinematography was good too, nothing very special or that stood out to me. The best part of the movie is the screenplay, but I am going to talk about that part in a bit. The set pieces were good too, even though there are all real. But that is all I have to say about the movie in this part of my review.
Now lets movie on to the characters, and the actors of them. Here they did something special in my opinion. They only had two cast members. The other people you see in the movie just have a minor role, and are just extras. So this movie just focuses on two characters. A male and a female. Jesse and Celine. The first one I am going to talk about is Jesse. He was played by Ethan Hawke. Hawke has recently took on some very bad roles. *cough* Getaway *cough* but also some good ones like "Boyhood". He plays two totally different characters in both movies, but in both movies he is really good. In "Before Sunrise" I think that he portrayed the character of Jesse very good. The Jesse character was good too, but more on that in the paragraph of the screenplay. Now the female part was played by Julie Delpy. She played the love interest of Jesse, who is called as you could have probably guessed Celine. I hadn't seen any work of her before I watched this movie, and I think that that is going to change soon. She was very good. The accent made her sound cute, no that is a joke, for everyone who has seen the movie. But to get serious again, the accent gave something more to the character of Celine. This gave away that she was french etc. The chemistry between these characters is also something that drove this movie further. They had very good on screen chemistry. A scene where you can see this very good is the so called 'record-shop' scene. Here they get in this listening cabin, and there is no dialogue, for quiet a long time, but you do not bother, that there is none. Not because the dialogue is so bad in every scene that you get a little brake from it, no, the dialogue is very good actually. It's the acting, and emotion on their faces that move this scene. The extras were very good. The one that stayed with me the most was the one with the street poet. I particularly liked this scene because it showed a bit of Hawkes character, but also because it is a beautiful scene overall.
The screenplay. This was like I have said earlier the best thing of the movie, and I wasn't kidding. It is a dialogue driven movie, and also a dialogue heavy movie. That's one of the things I was afraid of the they would screw up. But they didn't. Luckily. You often have these long conversations between the two characters, but you don't get bored of them. You get invested in them. There is this scene that I want to bring up. In this scene Jesse and Celine are sitting in some kind of bus, and they are asking each other questions to get to know each other. This scene is in particular good, because of the character development, but you also just get sucked into their conversations. Due to all of these dialogue scenes, you start to care for these characters, something that you don't see that often anymore in movies. "Good Will Hunting" (my favorite movie of all time) did this as well. But now the characters. these were, like I have said, very good. You get to know Jesse in small bits, first on the train, about his TV- sow idea, then on the bus about his shyness of his first love, and then you see that he really opens up for this girl, and he tells her about how his dad hated him. In combination of all of these aspects that I have just numbered, you really start to care for him. I cared less for Celine, but she was still a very good character. The conversations between Celine and Jesse also feel very real. So felt the actions they did. They looked like a normal couple.
But overall I thought that this was a very good love story, between two very good characters.