Before Sunset

Directed by Richard Linklater. Starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Rating unavailable.

Are the love affairs in our memories richer than the real things that are with us today? That's the essential question asked by Before Sunset, Richard Linklater's literate and loose-limbed follow-up to Before Sunrise, which came out almost 10 years ago.

In case you forgot--or were warned off the original by people who hate movies in which would-be lovers spend the night talking--Sunrise was about Jesse and Celine, an American drifter and a lyrical Parisian, respectively, who meet on a train to Vienna and agree to disembark until morning, when the next train will take her home. Here in the sequel they are older, skinnier, more than a little wiser, and still played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.

The actors developed the new story line with director Richard Linklater, and it's a wonderfully relaxed collaboration. But it is not without drama. Most of the conflict rests on the first film's open ending, which left viewers wondering if the duo would hook up again, six months later, as promised in the heat of, well, of a perfect summer night in Vienna. With that mystery cleared up, they find that they again have only a few hours to catch up before Jesse's flight takes him back to New York that evening.

It turns out that he, initially the more cynical of the two, is having some modest success as an author of the dreamy-romantic sort. And the main subject of the novel that has brought him to Paris's Shakespeare and Company for a reading at the famous English-language bookstore? Why, their relationship, of course. Being young, hopeful, and really quite stupid--as they both freely admit--Jesse and Celine neglected to exchange last names and other pertinent information, leaving a budding writer quite a bit of room for conjecture about what, or even who, might have been.

The pleasures of Before Sunset, as in any friendship resumed after too long a break, are not without their moments of self-consciousness, but these pleasures are still many and deep. Now in their early 30s, the protagonists are experienced enough for their insights to have greater meaning yet they are not hardened to life (even if her work as a health activist has bred something edging on cynicism). Most crucially, they are still open to the sun-touched physicality of a wander through Paris's Latin Quarter on a late-summer day.

It would be bad form to reveal too much about where their walk ends up. I'll just say that at its final image, the mostly male and middle-aged viewers at the media screening let out a big fat "Awwww". As in life, you may have to draw your own conclusions about that.

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