Before Sunset

(2004; Southcoast Village) Written and directed by Richard Linklater.   This film is the sequel to the 1995 film, “Before Sunrise,” a film that most people either loved or hated.  It was a sometimes-pretentious film about an American boy and a French girl who meet on a train and spend one night wandering the streets of Vienna together.  They don’t even know the other’s last name, let alone key information like phone-numbers and addresses (this was before the widespread use of email), but they opt to meet each other six months hence, in Vienna, and see what happens.  The first film ends without letting us know whether or not the couple followed through on their plans, leaving the viewer to decide if the ending will be romantic or cynical.   As the sequel, “Before Sunset” opens, Jesse is in Paris on a book tour promoting a novel he wrote based on the couple’s experience that one night.  Guess who walks into the bookstore?  That’s right, Celine (Julie Delpy), and the film unfolds in real time as we follow the couple through the streets of Paris.   Like the first film, but even more so, the film is, as every critic has noted, driven by conversation, but I would argue that it is also driven by body language and facial expression, and we see these two actors at their best, Hawke lending is nervous presence to what is, no matter how you look at it, an awkward situation, and Delpy explore the situation with a rich tableaux of facial expressions and gestures that help us understand how Jesse could fall in love with Celine in just one night, and remain in love with her for nine years, though he’s had no contact with her the entire time.   The first film worked for me, as Jesse explains in the first scene, because it made us believe in the power of meeting and connecting with another person.  As I’ve gotten older, just as the characters have, and, just as those characters realize, I’ve come to realize that these kinds of connections with another person are far rarer than we would like to think.  Sure there are lots of people I get along with, but very few with whom I have really connected.   This dynamic is what lends drama to “Before Sunset.”   Will these two former lovers, both of whom are in new relationships, one of whom is married with a four-year-old child, throw away those relationships to reestablish this one.  Will Jesse stay in Paris to be with Celine?  But what builds this drama is not some artificial plot device, but the real difficulty the two characters have in really coming to say what they really think and feel.  They flirt, and joke, and dance around the topic, but they find, as most of us it do, that it is both dangerous and difficult to say what you really feel.  So the question becomes, will they put into words what we all know is in their hearts, and this question takes priority over the more obviously cinematic question, will they put into action what we know they feel in their hearts?   I found myself loving this film, and though some critics panned some of the dialogue as failed attempts at profundity, I was attracted to this because it is exactly how people talk who do feel some kind of connection to each other, so connected that the ideas pour out of them without letting them fully form.  This quality, along with its exploration of the theme of the “roads not taken,” made it a quiet, but rich pleasure for my Thursday afternoon.   It’s a film that, like the first installment, will stick with me for a long time.