Before Sunrise (1995) & When An Inconsequential Stranger Becomes Consequential
When does a stranger no longer become a stranger? Listen to the voice over to read along with me.
I watched the first installment of Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy, Before Sunrise the other night, unknowingly it was on the same date as the 29th anniversary of the film’s premiere. That kinda thing has been happening to me a lot, it just so happens to be the film’s anniversary the same day I go to watch it, I am truly aligned with the universe. When I first saw the movie a couple of years ago I loved it, it was so up my alley that I wondered how I had never seen it before.
If you’ve never seen Before Sunrise, it goes a little something like this: Jesse an early 20-something American is traveling around Europe on a Euro rail pass, his final stop is in Vienna where his flight to America leaves in the morning. On the train, he sparks up a conversation with Celine, a French early 20-something. Jesse, not wanting to abandon the connection he and Celine have, asks her to take a chance, get off the train, and explore Vienna with him until his flight leaves in the morning. She agrees and they spend the rest of the day and night exploring, talking, and walking (one of the best ways to get a good conversation is through a walk and talk, in my opinion), and eventually things get romantic.
On that first viewing, I naively envied Jesse and Celine’s experience: the spontaneity, the adventure, the honesty, the connection. I wanted that. But now with some more life experience under my belt, it sits with me differently. At one point I almost turned it off because I didn’t want to deal with the emotions it was bringing up. But I spent $3.79 on the rental and I knew if I had turned it off I was not going to watch it again. I still like the film but when it finished and I turned the TV off —why am I lying I was watching it on my iPad in bed— I turned it off without the yearning and ache for romance akin to Jesse and Celine’s, like I was after the first viewing. I mean— I was, kinda, but for something with a different ending.
I have to remember to be careful what I wish for. I haven’t met someone on a train, explored Vienna with them, and then vowed to meet them at the same spot 6 months later. But when you’ve experienced the small details of what makes up Before Sunrise, the little moments that make up the relationship between Jesse and Celine, it becomes hard to watch. My glee while rewatching the film slowly left as I was reminded, almost at the same moment as Jesse and Celine, that at some point it all must end. That eventually the moments you share with a stranger, who maybe you want to become something more than just a stranger, will end and you might not ever be able to recreate the experience you had. Eventually, the sun will rise and you’ll have to move on.
The movie got me thinking about strangers. I’ve been thinking about the strangers we remember and the ones we forget. This week’s theme will not involve my romantic life or my dating life (SHOCKER).
One summer after my freshman year in college, I was flying alone from Pittsburgh to Chicago. When I got on the plane and sat in my window seat, I put on my headphones in and started to read my book. A girl around my age sat next to me and asked me what I was reading. Reluctantly I took my headphones out and told her. I put my headphones back in and moments later she asked me another question. Omfg are my headphones invisible?!.... I thought. This is back when I was more of an immovable object projecting an iron obstinancy (aka I used to be a major bitch). Of course, I wasn’t outright rude to her but I also wasn’t jumping into conversation. But she wore me down and I’m glad she did. We talked the entire hour-and-a-half flight. Her world was completely different from mine. Her family (sitting rows behind us) owned a cattle ranch. I joked, “Oh I bet you have milk all the time then” and she was like “no, not from the cows.” Oops, city girl here! She then reminded me, what I already knew but didn’t live in the forefront of my mind, that cattle ranches and dairy ranches are completely different. I wanted to redeem myself, being from Chicago I asked her if she knew what a Glock 49 looked like. I’m KIDDING. We both were in relationships at the time and she asked what kind of activities I do with my boyfriend, “watch movies, go out to eat, hang out with his friends, I sit in the garage while he fixes his car, idk” I told her. Then reciprocated the question. “We’ll usually go fishing in the pond, or ride our horses together” I remember letting out a confused laugh, What are you even talking about....? Besides our different social activities, we had a lot of common values and really bonded.
Have we talked since? No. But I’m grateful for our time together, and that she pushed me for connection. I’ve been told I’m not very approachable. When tourists have the option of asking me or the friend that I’m with to take a picture of them, I never get asked. (Little do they know I have photographer genes.) I’ve been told I’m intimidating. (I think that statement is 5% racism, 25% because I don’t walk around with a smile plastered on my face, and 70% because I’m so pretty it must be too scary to talk to me.) So when people DO push past that “intimidation”, those who push past the headphones, I give them my time. It must mean something, right(?). (I also want to make it clear that I’m not talking about ignoring the headphones if you’re catcalling me or something not worth my time.) I appreciate Chloe (the girl on the plane) and our experience, it made me even more open to talking to strangers.
As for potential connections with strangers, there’s this guy where I work who always studies on my floor. I’ve seen him pretty much every day for almost 7 months. Sometimes it’ll just be him studying alone and I’ll see him as I walk through the halls on my frequent trips to the bathroom (I have a small bladder). Sometimes he’s amongst other study-ers. I would have never noticed him, but he wears the same tan linen jacket every day. Recently I noticed I’ve started to look for him on days when he’s not in his usual spot. Even more recently we’ve been physically running into each other. Now I look him all the way up and down, trying to remember his face, could this inconsequential stranger one day turn into a person of consequence? I wonder if one day one of us will introduce ourselves. Probably not. Eventually, he won’t return and I’ll forget about him.
You know when you frequent the coffee shop, deli, or convenience store in your neighborhood and the workers there start to remember you and you build a rapport with them? Yeah, I don’t like doing that. The minute I realize they recognize me or have my order memorized I change it up, or I start going somewhere else entirely. (Ugh, especially if they take my name down with the order and they start to refer to me by name. But I DO NOT do this if the barista is cute of course.)
I don’t know why I hate it, it’s probably the last sliver of community we have left in urban America. I think it’s just that I don’t like people thinking they know me or my order. Like if they just ASSUME I’m gonna order the breakfast sammie and a vanilla latte because I have it every day, that’s exactly when I’m gonna switch it up. Now I’m definitely gonna get the breakfast wrap and a drip coffee because who the fuck do you think you are?
It’s very Larry David/Seinfeld of me, I know. I need to get over whatever unconscious fear I have that’s making me act like this, maybe I’ll do some shadow work (but probably not). There are benefits to building community and going to a place “where everybody knows your name”. So when do you introduce yourself to the barista? Or the bartender you always see? Or the person you’ve seen on your commute for years now? There’s value in taking the connection past the general niceties, and when you don’t there’s the potential for missing out on something great. My grandma used to pick me up from school every day (except Thursdays when my dad picked me up) this lasted from kindergarten to high school. We would run errands after school or go out to eat, usually at the same places. We’d pick up her cigarettes at the same neighborhood gas station, and go to the same neighborhood grocery stores. Everyone knew her and everyone watched me grow up. But when she died, at her funeral I looked out at the crowd and thought about all of those people that knew her and would have wanted to be there. But I didn’t know their names.
You never know what you’ll be able to bring to people’s lives. When I missed my Amtrak train by literal seconds and cried in Union Station, an older woman came over to me and asked if I was okay. Usually, I can pull it together quickly (“Big girls don’t cry” is what my father always used to say, and then subsequently hit play on the Fergie album) but this time I crumbled. We both ended up talking about our grief and cried together. At the end of our talk, she went back to work and I realized she spent her entire lunch break talking to me. I can count on two hands the amount of people in my life who have seen me cry. Is there something enchanting about a stranger you find a connection with? Have you ever found yourself telling a completely neutral stranger your whole life story or something you’ve never told anyone before? Is it because we’ll never see them again? Probably? Or is it that in these moments we can be our complete selves? Because there are “no rules”? Now I can’t even remember this woman’s face, I don’t think I ever even got her name. I liked the moment in Before Sunrise when Celine says something like, “You couldn’t possibly know why a night like this is so important to my life right now, but it is.” That resonated with me, it’s hard to express that to people, it feels dramatic, like I’m doing too much. But there are so many people out there who might need a moment of kindness, connection, and empathy.
At the end of Before Sunrise, Linklater brings us back to the spots where Jesse and Celine went together, now devoid of the two as the sun rises. The cafes they sat and talked at, the monuments they sat under, the wooden pallet they sat on in a European corridor. These shots are static and the locations Jesse and Celine touched are “[n]ow empty, they are bathed in a morning-after light that dispels the magic of the night before, leaving dull spaces. And it was magic, we now get in retrospect.” 1
There was some magic in what Celine and Jesse had, that’s why the movie is so popular among romantics. That magic is (probably) why Linklater developed the idea for the film after a similar experience he had. These things linger with you, the words of someone you could have never imagined on your own linger with you. But it’s hard to notice the magic in the moment. And in retrospect, bathing in the clarity that comes with dawn, you might realize a stranger has made a mark on your life.
When that stranger you used to see on the subway platform every day isn’t there anymore, or the barista who’s always there on Mondays around 3 pm isn’t there, or when the homeless person who usually sits on the corner outside the subway is gone and so is their stuff, do you take notice? I do. Like the ending shots of Before Sunrise, I linger on those empty spots that the not-so-consequential but also not-so-inconsequential people used to occupy. I mourn the person I used to see and move on.
Horton, Robert. “Richard Linklater as Eric Rohmer.: Offhand Enchantment.” Film Comment 31, no. 1 (1995): 4–7, page 7. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43455061.