Before Sunset (2004)

Yay, RE-view time! I feel like I haven't gotten down to RE-view time in, like, forever. I have a few movies to RE-view, and I am glad we are starting with this one.

Yes, yes, it did take me nearly four years to watch this movie again. I was once again a victim of my own ZipList, in large part because the sequel arrived before the original, and I was hell bent on watching the original first. I also wasn't ready for it for a long time. When I said in my initial review that watching it the first time was agony, I wasn't kidding. It is agony, but it is exquisite agony.

Oh, why wasn't she there? It's been long enough that I can let the cat out of the bag. It's devastating to learn that Jesse showed up and Celine didn't. Celine was the romantic; Jesse's the one who pays for it. I love that he first lies that he wasn't there either, then brushes it off as unimportant, then pleads with her to attribute some meaning to her actions and his life subsequent all in the span of eighty minutes. They've got no time to waste.

The decision to have Hawke and Delpy write the screenplay with Linklater is nothing short of a stroke of genius. Usually sequels are put out with such short time between the stories that the characters have barely changed or such a long time later that the characters are much, much older. In this case, it's neither, yet Hawke, Delpy, and Linklater write Jesse and Celine as heartrendingly realistic older versions of the characters we met in the first film. The verbal tics they use to carry the characters forward are so small that it's easy to miss them: Celine says that she still wants to believe that there is magic in the world; Jesse kids on the square that Celine "plugs" any guy's name in the waltz she wrote about that night, about their night.

The impassive camera catches him hesitantly trying to touch her and pulling back at the last moment. It's so sad and real when the movie suggests that maybe they weren't wrong to romanticize that night. He wrote a novel to reach her. He's married with a kid now, but he was thinking of her on his wedding day. He thought he saw her out of the corner of his eye on the way to the church, he explains. He might have, she confirms. It isn't a romantic comedy about two people who can't quite get it together; it's a romance about two people who want to get it together but have neither the time nor space to do so. Waking Life had them together, but they weren't really. It was just one of Jesse's recurring dreams about the two of them. She demurs as much as she can, but she's felt his absence every painful minute since as well. It ends, as it should, as ambiguously as the first, as romantic and honest and in love as anything could be. A+