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Helen M Jerome reviews
- Cert:
- Running time: 80 minutes
- Year: 2004
- Released: 23rd July 2004
- Sound: DTS, SDDS, Dolby Digital 5.1
- Widescreen: 1.85:1
Director:
- Richard Linklater
(Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused, School of Rock)
Producer:
- Anne Walker-McBay
Screenplay:
- Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke
Cinematographer:
- Lee Daniel
(Slacker, Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise)
Music Score:
- Julie Delpy, Nina Simone, Glover Gill
Cast:
- Jesse: Ethan Hawke
Celine: Julie Delpy
Bookstore Manager: Vernon Dobtcheff
Journalist 1: Louise Lemoine Torres
Journalist 2: Rodolphe Pauly
Waitress: Mariane Plasteig
Philippe: Diabolo
Boat Attendant: Denis Evrard
Man at Grill: Albert Delpy
Woman at Courtyard: Marie Pillet
When indie director Richard Slacker¹ Linklater pulled off the hit feelgood Jack Black movie School of Rock with considerable aplomb, it was a bit like discovering your favourite obscure novelist had worked on the Star Wars screenplay. Having flexed his mainstream muscles, Linklater now does that other Hollywood trick of making a sequel. But Before Sunset is no Spider-Man 2 or Shrek 2. This is no big, sponsored, highly-marketed franchise replete with product placement, overpaid stars with big trailers and bigger egos. We have waited nine long years to find out what happened to the youthful strangers of Before Sunrise, and this is as near perfect a companion piece to its predecessor as you could imagine. Those of us who adored the first film which observed a brief encounter between two travellers over one night in Vienna will feel right at home, as if catching up with old friends over a coffee. Those who missed Sunrise (you fools!) are treated to liberal flashbacks at the start.
To recap, the duo agreed to meet up six months after Vienna, but we soon discover what prevented this happening. Now grown up, Jesse and Celine are once again played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, with these outstanding actors also collaborating on much of the dialogue for themselves and each other. Writer Jesse in a self-referential nod to Hawke¹s own novel writing is in Paris on the last leg of his book tour, jaded and looking forward to returning to New York, when Celine turns up at the reading. His novel is a thinly disguised account of their night in Vienna and she is as intrigued as he is floored by seeing her. “I was fine until I read your fucking book!” admits Celine.
Over the next hour the film unspooling in real time they walk around the left bank, sit in a café, wander through a garden, travel down the Seine on a bateau mouche, argue in a taxi and gradually reveal the gaping holes in their lives and relationships since they parted. He is married with a young son, but deeply unhappy. She is an environmental campaigner, currently involved with a photojournalist, but equally unfulfilled and restless. Their highly engaging conversation shows that they have very different memories of their previous meeting, although Celine has also documented that night in a song. Pithily, she comments: “Maybe we¹re only good at brief encounters, walking around in European cities.”
One would be hard-hearted not to warm to this romantic miniature of a film. The dialogue smoulders and flares as Jesse and Celine flirt shamelessly and rekindle their irresistible attraction. Their acting appears so naturalistic as to that it has an almost documentary-like feel. The only remaining question is whether a further follow-up is in the pipeline. See you in another 10 years for Before Lunchtime perhaps?
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Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.