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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