Until the Night
Memory is a wonderful thing if you don’t have to deal with the past,” declares French Celine (Julie Delpy) to her erstwhile American one-night-stand, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), in Before Sunset, the meandering but reasonably charming follow-up to the duo’s 1995 Euromance Before Sunrise.
Passionate hearts bold enough to retain their memories of the 1990s may recall that these star-crossed Gen-Xers met aboard a train the last time around and spent the night in Vienna more or less deciding whether they should, you know, do it. But they left their budding relationship to fate, and fate kinda screwed them. Mobile communication devices and e-mail weren’t yet omnipresent, and silly Celine and Jesse decided they’d just meet again in Vienna six months later. Whoops.
We pick up with them this time in Paris, and apparently we have entered the world of fantasy. Delpy plays a French person who doesn’t appear to smoke, and Hawke plays an author with fawning fans. His desire to “build something,” relationship-wise, by fictionalizing their brief tryst brings them together at the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop, the last stop of Jesse’s promotional tour. Their eyes meet across the stacks. She looks all of 10 minutes older. He looks in need of radical carb-injection therapy. Then they begin talking.
And talking.
One must hand it to director Richard Linklater (School of Rock) for doing the seemingly impossible time and again. In Slacker, he proved that Austin slop could captivate. In this film’s predecessor and his splendid animated feature Waking Life (which featured Celine and Jesse in a cameo), he illustrated that passionate romantic yammering has no end, needs no end. And here, in a script conceived with his actors, he sets ’em loose again. At first, the dialogue feels forced; crashing boredom seems imminent. Then something human happens, and despite the occasional clinker, these two feel real, like troubled friends.
They both feel something for each other, but Jesse has only a few minutes before his handlers must pack him onto a plane and ship him back to New York. Thus, they set out together in “real time” into the human, less glamorous nooks and crannies of Paris (read: cheaper shooting permits), where they swiftly divulge everything possible in order to see whether they indeed belong together. She’s gone very lefty; he’s more conservative. He has a son; she has a lover. They tease each other with snide sexual comments, test each other with evaluations of commitment. Then comes the kicker.
Celine admits that she has written a song about her cat. This proves that Jesse is clinically insane, because he does not instantly point, scream and flee. The movie is rife with such remarkable twists.
Before Sunset is also, like its predecessor, an experiment, so even within its short, 80-minute duration, it is packed with hits and misses. Still, Hawke and Delpy manage to zero in on how love must grow organically, how lovers must fight restrictive scheduling to cultivate their affections and mutual appreciation. Their thoughts are as scattershot as anyone’s, but the movie espouses one delightful theme: Fuck punctuality. Amen.
