The first film ended at a train station with a question. This one opens nine years later in a Paris bookshop and spends its entire running time — 80 minutes, in something close to real time — answering it, and then asking a harder one. If you have not seen Before Sunrise, see it first. If you have, you already know what to expect: two people, one long conversation, the creeping awareness that the afternoon is ending.
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy wrote the dialogue themselves, and it shows — not in a showy way but in the way that lines feel inhabited rather than performed. They walk through Paris as if they have been doing it for years, which of course they have. The city is beautiful in that particular late-afternoon light that makes everything feel both urgent and already past.
Linklater trusts the conversation completely. There are no cutaways, no montages, no music swelling to tell you what to feel. A boat on the Seine. A café. A garden. A car. An apartment. The whole film is walking and talking and the unbearable nearness of running out of time.
The ending — which I will not describe — is one of the great endings in American cinema. It arrives exactly when the clock runs out. Watch it in the evening, when you have nowhere to be immediately afterward.
VERDICT — As close as cinema gets to the feeling of a real conversation. One of the great films about time, which is to say one of the great films about everything.
POUR — A Sancerre, chilled but not cold. Something French and uncomplicated.
MOOD — Wistful. Quietly urgent. Grateful for wherever you are.
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