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Before
Sunset
  We at the Goliard have been big
fans of director Richard
Linklater (shown mid-page directing Ethan Hawke and
Julie Delpy) ever since we took a break
one day during gradual school from spewing doggerel and arguing half
ass theories with other dead beats to stumble in off the street one hot Tucson afternoon and catch his first
film Slacker. We
still remember the feeling of being completely flummoxed by the
experience when the movie turned out to be a total doppelganger about a bunch of folks who looked hauntingly familiar
and who were themselves stumbling
around the dusty streets of the similar college town of Austin, TX
and doing basically nothing other than
behaving exactly as we young goliards were and having many of the same senseless conversations we had
been having. We
still place the film in our top five despite the probably fifty subsequent
viewings and have made it a point to catch all Linklater's later efforts as soon as they come to the theaters. And although he hasn't quite been
able to recreate the spontaneity and low budget brilliance of Slacker, each
film has been excellent in its own way with almost all of them
having in common that they take place in the span of a day or less
and focus more on people exchanging real ideas in real time without
relying on cinematic effects of any kind. The latest, Before Sunset,
is no exception.
 Before
Sunset is a sequel to
Linklater's third feature Before
Sunrise which told the story of American traveler Jesse (Ethan
Hawke) who met French graduate student Celine (Julie
Delpy) on a train from Budapest to Vienna. The two spend the
next fourteen hours together hanging out and walking around the
Austrian city
finding
that they are either falling in love with each other or with the
idea of falling in love with a stranger in such a short time. They
are young after all and it is unclear to them and us whether this is
indeed a
truly special encounter or just another fourteen hours of the whirlwind
tour of youth. When morning comes and she must return to school,
they tenentively
agree to meet six months later and the film ends without speculating
whether either of them will show up.
 Well
one of them showed up and the other didn't, as it turns out, and Before
Sunset picks up nine years
later as Jesse visits Paris on the final leg of a book tour. He is a
writer now and has just written a novel, which he is touring to support, based on the one night they spent
together and that he has not been able to get out of his head in the
years since. When she shows up at the reading, they have an hour or
so to get caught up before he has to head to the airport and back to
New York and his wife and son. They spend it walking through Paris
in real time, talking about what has happened to each of them, and
slowly realizing that the night nine years ago had as weighty an effect on one
as the other. The movie again ends ambiguously although not without
some suggested sense of closure and it looks like we'll have to wait
another decade or so to see what else, if anything, befalls them.
 It's hard to tell in the sequel as it was in the first installment
whether the acting is really good or whether Hawke and Delpy (at
right in a scene from another Linklater film Waking
Life) are
playing so much of their own selves that it seems almost effortless.
They also helped write Sunset and have a great chemistry on screen for whatever reason and although she seems far more desirable
as a person than he does (even to the females on staff who have seen
both films) it is easy to believe that the two actually hit it off and were
affected by the knowledge of each other for all these years. However, although the
two actors obviously dominate the film with their presence, the film
feels to us like it is more about using them as a vehicle to explore dreams, travels,
what ifs, and the travails of life than it is about the two specific
people. Not that the characters aren't compelling on their own, but ever since Linklater first appeared in the initial scene in
Slacker where he climbs into a cab and immediately wonders
aloud to the cabbie whether he should have found different
transportation home from the bus station since he could have
possibly met the girl of his dreams, he and Sunrise co-creator Kim Krizan
(she appears in Slacker as well as the girl questioning ultimate happiness) have
been exploring paths not taken and reminding us that the road we are
on isn't necessarily the one where we belong. In Before
Sunset, even
though it was Celine that didn't show up
for their rendezvous because of a death in the family, since she
wasn't ever sure if he showed up either, she never really knew if she had lost
anything but always wondered, and the idea that she missed something
worked it's way into all her subsequent relationships as she
struggled to again experience romantic love.
 After she
didn't appear in Vienna, Jesse went on
with his life as well, getting married and having a child, but always
thought about Celine even on the way to his wedding, where he could have
sworn that he saw her out the window as he was driving to the church (he
thought he was seeing things but it could have actually been her, we
find out, since she spent a couple years working in New York and
was living just a few blocks away at the time). He then goes on to
start a
family, but feels the need to spend several years writing a book about the night they
were together which she then reads and the whole thing is reopened
again. Since we all have past experiences similar to this on one level
or another, the film leaves us pondering the version of reality that
we currently face by reminding us of all the other possibilities
that fell by the wayside as we ventured hither and yon about the
glebe. And anyone who's spent time traveling around
and had fleeting acquaintances with various strangers here and there
over the years will walk out of the film reminded that they have no
idea what became of most of the people that seemed so important at
the time and how many relationships they had could have reached a different
fruition had circumstances allowed or been slightly different. Like
most of Linklater film's Before Sunset bucks the cinematic trend by
illustrating that perfectly scripted endings aren't always the norm and real life tends
to get away from people. It also proves that an 80 minute film that contains no footage
of things
blowing up, no nudity, none of the latest special effects, no multiple exotic film
locations, no gunplay and none of the bells and whistles that recent cinema seems to feel is
necessary, can make for a great and thought provoking summer movie
all the same.
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