D.C. MOVIE GUYS

Bill’s Review
Nine years ago characters played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy met, connected, spent the night walking around Vienna (Austria not Virginia), got to know each other very well, and swore to meet up again in six months. So what happened after Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise? We now have at least one answer in the sequel, Before Sunset (although animated versions of the pair were featured in the same director’s Waking Life and it did not look like nine years between meetings). Perhaps this is the “official” answer to the question, but every member of the first movie’s audience had already written their own sequel.
In Mr. Linklater’s version, Hawke and Delpy do not reunite in six months, but rather nine years later in Paris when he is on a book tour with a Paris stopover. The movie begins with Jesse (Hawke) speaking to a throng at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore speaking about his novel which we quickly come to realize is a thinly-veiled roman a clef of his long night’s journey with Delpy’s Celine. She has come to his reading and the pair decide to spend the just over an hour before he has to leave for the airport catching up (the movie never expressly states it, but it appears that the movie’s time takes place in real time a la 24). And for the rest of movie, the pair chat, reminisce, debate, speak of missed opportunities, and give a state of their lives report.
This movie can be classified best as belonging to a category I call, “A Couple of White Guys Sitting Around Talking.” And as such I would be hard-pressed to recommend (despite my enjoying it) to anyone save those who were besotted with the original. Evaluating movies or any other work of art is highly subjective at best, but this whole movie’s appeal rests on the likeability of the pair and how much you are willing to put up with. Although the walking (and some bits of boating and driving) tour of Paris is refreshing (very few touristy shots except one of the Notre Dame Cathedral to illustrate a point about impermanence by Linklater), there will be very little else to any who find this pair insufferable. With the difference between enraptured and intolerable so razor thin, one has to jump in with both feet and simply let the movie roll over you.
None of their conversational topics are particularly memorable and the film’s most intriguing bit of dialogue comes during the beginning sequence in the bookstore where Jesse is being probed as to just what degree his book is autobiographical. In response to the inevitable question, Jesse sidesteps revelation and instead supplies the most intriguing point of the movie as well as a potential dismissal of why anyone should care for the next hour’s transpirings.
The Austin auteur is quick to remind us (albeit using Mr. Hawke’s mouth), it does not really matter how he wrote the ending since everybody that saw the first movie had already written an ending for the two lovers and that whatever the ending we furnish says more about who we are and what we stand for.
In mine, for instance, the pair unite and live happily ever after though Mr. Hawke becomes depressed after he realizes how stupid both Training Day and cheating on Uma Thurman are and he gives up acting altogether in atonement for his Hamlet and settles down for his career as a novelist… possibly in Paris.

Related Reading:

The Independent Movie Poster Book

If You Take a Mouse to the Movies (Book & Cassette)

The Film Club: A Memoir

Understanding Movies Value Package (includes Filmmakers on Film (CD)) (9th Edition)

The Queer Movie Poster Book