Before the Last Stop

I was reading The Gambler’s last pages on the train. Having a phone with a short battery life does wonders for my reading habits. Two French girls sat across from me. One was pale and blond and pretty, the other doesn’t really matter. She spoke mellifluously, fortunately, since I’m trying to plug this word since I can remember. She was also reading a book. The other girl said something and the blond girl started chortling like a pig, really digging the sounds from the back of her skull through her nostrils. A pig would put a hoof in front of his snout.

No, this was not my Celine.

In Before Sunrise, Celine (Julie Delpy) is travelling back from Budapest, where she visited her grandmother. She gets annoyed by an arguing German couple – I suppose if they were Italian, she’d stay – and moves seats to avoid them. Unwittingly or not, she sits abreast Jesse (Ethan Hawke). They bond over other couples’ problems and quirks, moving their conversation to the food cart. Celine is French and, like most French girls, her accent while speaking English is a mix of sexy and adorable. Her unconventional beauty and hippy style, combine perfectly with the accent. Jesse is American. They bond some more and Jesse asks Celine to get out of the cart in Vienna where he’ll have a flight early next morning. (My train would stop in 45 minutes in the remotest village in Portugal, which would make it harder to convince my Celine to leave with me). That decision was made a few minutes before. Jesse tells a story from his childhood that makes Celine eyes twinkle. Later on we see him as a practical man, with little mystical and