REVIEWED: BEFORE SUNSET Nine years ago, writes Michael Dwyer, in the first of the many unexpected shifts of style and form that have marked his distinctive career, writer-director Richard Linklater followed the laid-back humour of his first two features, Slacker and Dazed and Confused, with the unexpectedly sensitive and mature love story, Before Sunrise.
In sharp contrast to his multi-charactered earlier films, it concentrates almost exclusively on two characters - strangers on a train who share a brief encounter. Ethan Hawke plays Jesse, a young Texan touring Europe, dropped by his girlfriend in Madrid and on a solo journey from Budapest to Vienna, when he meets Celine (Julie Delpy), a Sorbonne student who he impulsively persuades to spend his last night in Europe with him.
This lyrical, thoughtful and wryly humorous film gradually exerts a seductive pull as it reflects on the nature of attraction with honesty and insight and a deep, palpable sense of the romantic that peaks magically. One of those rare romantic movies to be rooted in realism, Before Sunrise has now found a perfect match in Linklater's superb sequel, Before Sunset.
While the new film works perfectly on its own merits, anyone who has seen and admired its predecessor will find a wealth of resonance to savour. It begins, aptly enough, nine years on, and once again Jesse is on his last day of a European trip. Now an author, he is promoting his novel, This Time, on a tour concluding at the Shakespeare & Co bookshop in Paris. A journalist notes that the novel is open-ended, and asks Jesse if he thinks the central characters will get back together again. "That depends on whether you're a romantic or a cynic," Jesse replies.
Enter Celine, who now works for a Paris-based environmental agency, and Jesse's excitement at seeing her again is apparent. He is thrown when she tells him she has read his book and found it "vaguely familiar". When he tells her he devoted about four years to writing it, she comments that that is "a very long time to be writing about one night".
And so, once again, they walk and talk, and the screenplay, developed by Linklater with Hawke and Delpy, keeps them on the move, rhythmically manoeuvring them through streets and alleys, to a coffee shop, through a park and aboard a bateau mouche along the Seine. Once again, every other character in the movie is peripheral, and few have any lines to utter, but who needs them when we are eavesdropping on such a fascinating conversation? Jesse and Celine have so much to say to each other, but are again constrained by his travel timetable. They each remember the details of their former encounter in different ways, and, inevitably, with both now in their thirties - Jesse has lost his boyish looks, but Celine looks more radiant than ever - they have changed in significant and subtle ways.
Time flies in such company, and, as this blissful movie approaches the final stages of its fleeting duration, it takes on the urgency of a thriller, as the clock ticks towards Jesse's flight home, and as the question asked of Jesse in the bookshop returns to the surface. Will they get back together? This is such a perceptive, acutely observed, eloquently expressed and wholly endearing movie that even cynics may join us romantics in crossing our fingers for the outcome.
