Before Sunset (2004)

It is patently criminal that Julie Delpy came to a Hollywood so long devoid of glamour. If she'd arrived in 1934, or so, she'd have been in the elite class of leading lady, handled by directors like George Cukor, Leo McCarey or Preston Sturgess. She can smolder and spark, a cross section of Katherine Hepburn, Carole Lombard and Greta Garbo. No one today knows what to do with a woman of her talent and dimension.

As the 23 year old Celine in Before Sunrise she was the cherubic vision, as Ethan Hawke's character conceded in the film, something straight out of a Botticelli painting. Nine years later we meet her in a book shop in Paris, a lithe and faun-like 32 with eyes that have moved closer in, settling on purpose over speculation; she is both cool and elegant, sharp and direct.

Ethan Hawke as the male lead, Jesse, is drawn and stressed like tree bark. On the train to Vienna in 1994 he was soft-faced and greasy-haired, a slacker proto-type that a century before would have been immediately pegged as Byronic, something out of Puccini. Now his hair is short, his cheek bones ride high to the surface against gravity and the rut between his eyes, a furrowing scar, is deep.

Before Sunrise was a complete work, unrequiring of further elaboration. The lovers who met on a train and spent an intense night of romantic communion in summer in Vienna hung unresolved and ripe, always ready to be picked. But curiosity got the better of filmmaker Richard Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. While filming a short vignette involving their characters, Jesse and Celine, for Linklater's film Waking Life (2000) they got to yarning about what might have happened after the events of Before Sunrise. From that grew a lengthy three way correspondence that resulted in the script for Before Sunset. Filmed in 2003 and released summer 2004, it is the continuation of the Jesse and Celine saga.

It's easy to take art and entertainment too personally. You engage in private with elaborate scenario and well drawn characters and you begin to believe it's part of your life, that you have right to it some how. I adore Before Sunrise and keep it in my back pocket, so to speak, part of what I believe about movies and life. So the idea of an unnecessary sequel made my blood run cold. But I also had faith in the people making it and felt an inclination to see it. Aging is as inevitable for characters as viewers, even if there were no sequel, Jesse and Celine would have aged a million times in the imaginations of viewers. You can't pause art any more than you can pause life. I sensed I was obligated to see it.

The film unfolds in real time, following the characters through ninety minutes of a day in Paris. It is patient and good natured, more open and realistic than the first, taking in emotional highs and lows and moments of candid authenticity that would make the negatives of lesser films burst into flames from simple jealousy.
But for all its quality it's hard to deal with.

I'll admit that, though I liked the film, the first time I saw Before Sunset it ruined my day for an entire week. I was miserable at how good it was, how authentic and touching. Not that I wished it to be worse but it's an emotional roller coaster, and to experience it vicariously...no closure for an audience member. We cannot embrace Celine or talk things over with Jesse. These two films together are so good they form a special kind of neurosis, a deep anxiety over fictional love. I can only watch them once every couple years and I seriously don't know If I would survive a third installment, if it should ever come to that.