(Oh and ladies, if you are out there, this can work the other way too. If you tell your guy that it’s directed by indie-cred magnet Linklater he’ll be so impressed by your movie knowledge he’ll be doubly excited to watch with you.)

The premise is pure chick flick: Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delphy) sit next to one another on a European train and strike up a conversation. Lucky them; when I take the train, I wind up next to people with tuberculosis. Nevertheless, they continue talking over a snack in the dining car and find they have an effortless connection. Celine is returning home to Paris after a trip to see her grandmother, Jesse to Vienna where he is spending a single night wandering the streets before hopping a 9:00 AM flight back to the United States. When the train arrives in Vienna, Jesse follows his heart: inviting Celine to spend the night in Vienna with him. She thinks it over and decides to join him.

BEFORE SUNRISE is a movie that will make you believe in the genuine power of romance. Even if the film starts with a typical meet cute, there are no cutesy complications of plot bringing our two lovers together or pulling them apart simply because the running time demands it. They simply meet and spend a day together talking, and find that nothing is sexier than really good conversation. Linklater, who wrote the script with Kim Krizan, covers all his favorite topics: sex, death, God - y’know, trivial stuff. Linklater loves to film dialogue, even his animation extravaganza Waking Life is an experiment in making visuals as stimulating as the conversations people are having throughout the picture. Here, he is at his most naturalistic and the acting, by Hawke and Delphy, pops with real chemistry. For the hesitant guys in the audience, check out Hawke in this movie. More than a few times I felt he was saying things that could have come out of my mouth. And dig on how often he starts his stories with phrases like “I read this story,” or “One time, I was hanging with my friend.” People in movies never talk like that - but they do in BEFORE SUNRISE.

So few movies seem to speak the truth. The movies are a great place for fantasy, but they can also capture real life as it happens unlike any other artistic medium in history. It seems a contradiction, but BEFORE SUNRISE is magical specifically because it is so real. It has real insight into the human condition, into the way people talk and think, and it doesn’t bend to any sort of preconceived notion of what a romantic film must be. Even the ending is intensely mushy without an ounce of sentimentality. There is conflict, but not in the form of ex-boyfriends or bratty children or untrainable dogs. Our lovers battle against time, and Jesse and Celine realize that that closer they grow, the shorter their time together becomes. And if that isn’t a profound metaphor for life I don’t know what is.