very good in retrospect

Rating: 6/10 (18 April 2014)

I started to truly appreciate Before Sunrise after the third installment of this "series", Before Midnight, filmed two decades later. Without this dimension, knowing that there were two more movies with the same characters and in the same vein, Before Sunrise would have been just another art-house movie.
We follow the protagonists that meet accidentally on the train. They seem to be the ideal Western combination, French female polyglot and American male with artistic tendencies. They spend a night together in Vienna and discover their own landmarks of the city.
What sets apart this movie with from all other similar features is the dialog. The whole movie is more or less one lengthy conversation with all advantages and disadvantages such an approach might bring with itself. Yet, they touch all possible topics interesting to the people of their age, presumably early twenties. They range from abstract thought on life, arts and passage of time to reference of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, raging couple of hundreds of kilometers away.