Camille Claudel's Portrait by Auguste Rodin. Camille Claudel met Rodin while studying at the Académie Colarossi in 1883, and became his colleague and mistress. They separated in the mid-1890s. After the separation, creative difficulties and crippling loneliness increasingly hampered her work, and she was committed to a psychiatric institution in 1913, where she remained until her death in 1943.
In 1886 Rodin began modeling a portrait of Camille Claudel in traditional costume. When his assistant Victor Peter, executing the work in marble, reached the collar, Rodin made him stop: the head emerging from the block offered the contrast, as in Michelangelo, of a finished section imprisoned in the rough-hewn stone. This triumph of sculpture was exhibited as it was at the Salon in 1895, entitled Head. Only later did it receive its Symbolist title of Thought Emerging from Matter, then simply Thought.

— Before Sunset

What makes 'Before Sunrise' special?

Instead of showing or telling you about a love story, 'Before Sunrise' places you deep in the love story itself. It follows the ancient sacred rule of cinema «show, don't tell».

Try and remember the long conversations you had with a lover of yours when you both were trying to "know" each other: you find yourselves talking about everything and nothing at the same time. The world fades out and becomes irrelevant, and the focus becomes you and your lover-to-be. Everything becomes fantastical and magical. The worries and aspirations of both your lives recede to the background, while other people are reduced to secondary characters that add up to the magic of the moment (just like the palm-reader, the poet-beggar, and the harpsichord player).

'Before Sunrise' is one such conversation. The whole movie is basically one long dialogue between two lovers, any- and everything else that happens around the couple merely serves to fuel this dialogue further. It is no coincidence that they meet in Vienna and are meant to depart before sunrise; lover-talk moves both interlocutors to a fantastical, exciting, and unfamiliar place. That's what happens to Jesse and Celine, the American and the French, who spend their one and only wild night in Austrian Vienna.

What keeps such conversations afloat, is the pleasure one gets from exploring, from discovering, someone else with all their quirks and eccentricity. It is the same pleasure you derive from exploring a new city (the dark alleys and the fancy restaurants alike).

But seriously, the real reason is because Jolie Delpy (with her French features and mannerisms) is so damn adorable

The Paraguayan Woman,
by Juan Manuel Blanes

An episode of yellow fever,
by Juan Manuel Blanes

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