| Culturebox My Summer of Before Sunrise I traveled across Europe looking for my own Ethan Hawke. Turned out I was no Julie Delpy. By Rebecca Schuman
Posted Thursday, Jun 13, 2013, at 01:35 PM ET  This week, Richard Linklater's indie hit Before Midnight expands to theaters around the country, including in my Midwestern city. I have pre-purchased my ticket to a noon matinee on opening day, as I did with 2004's Before Sunset—and, as in 2004, I'll be attending alone, so that I may afford my wistful nostalgia the pensive solitude it deserves. I affected a similar pensive solitude back in 1995, the year Céline and Jesse first hit the screen, and the year I, too, Eurailed my way across the former Eastern Bloc. Rather pathologically inspired by the first film in Linklater's series, Before Sunrise, I spent my own European journey dead-set on finding a Jesse of my own. Given that real life is not the movies, when I met a bookish American boy that summer 18 years ago, I didn't get quite as lucky as Julie Delpy. As I watch Céline and Jesse this weekend, I'll be thinking fondly of their awkward, 1990s selves—and somewhat less fondly of foolish, beyond-awkward 1990s me. The film scholar Steve Vineburg has written that for many, Before Sunrise was so affecting that "you wanted to carry it around with you as long as you could, like a dream seeping into the morning hours that you try desperately to hold onto." Eighteen-year-old me wasn't one for subtlety; I not only cleaved onto that dream, I also attempted to pummel it into the literal. Jesse wasn't a ... To continue reading, click here.
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