2004 · R · Film
Eighty minutes in real time, one afternoon in Paris — a film about the conversation you keep returning to.
Richard Linklater’s sequel to Before Sunrise is set entirely in the hours before a plane departs, which gives the whole film an undertow that never announces itself but is always there. Nine years have passed since Jesse and Céline spent a night in Vienna. They meet again in a Paris bookshop and walk and talk until a taxi finally stops in front of her apartment building. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy wrote much of their own dialogue and it shows — in the best way. The film sounds like two real people catching up, which means it sounds like two real people carefully circling everything they actually want to say. It is the rarest kind of sequel: one that earns the original by deepening it.
Watch it with someone you have history with, or alone if the history is internal. It does not require having seen Before Sunrise, though that film gives this one more weight. The ending — the last few minutes in her apartment, the final line — is one of the best in American cinema of the decade, and lands differently each time depending on where you are. Best seen in the evening, when the light outside is doing something similar to what Paris is doing on screen.
VERDICT · The sequel that earns everything the first film promised.
POUR · A glass of Burgundy, something with a little age. Or a café au lait if the evening is long.
Planning an evening around this? The Foreign Film Night →
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