Part 2—Before Sunset

Hi! I knew you'd come! You look sensational, too. You've lost weight, haven't you? Let's take this table by the fountain. …

I don't know about you, but I was bummed to learn that Celine didn't show up in Vienna, especially since her grandmother had already croaked and it's not that far to travel if you're in Europe. I also disliked the glib way that Celine expressed her pity: "Oh, no! You were there, weren't you! Ohhh. Have you been hating me all this time?" If he didn't before, he should have hated her then.

But that's Linklater's brilliance, isn't it? The gimmick this time is that she's trying to say it didn't mean that much to her. ("You idealized that night a bit." Ouch.) And he's trying to say it meant a lot to him, but hey, he's beyond it now, he sublimated it all into a novel. And they both have to figure out a way to reveal, in spite of themselves, how they really feel—how to let their conversation circle in, oh so gingerly, on that quivering nucleus of longing in each of them for the other. Will they get there before the sun sets? That's how Linklater injects the same brand of subtextual suspense as before: by lingering purposefully on their fake bonhomie, their "we're-all-grown-ups-here, wasn't-that-a-time" chattering over the void as the clock ticks away and the plane back to the United States beckons.

Was Delpy's Celine so neurotic in Before Sunrise? You can sense from the start that she doesn't mean what she's saying, and it's slightly off-putting—as is her appearance. Of course she's still drop-dead gorgeous, but I miss that little bit of baby fat that made her squeezably soft. Tiens … Hawke is more bearable this time, maybe because Jesse has been holding forth on his book tour for weeks, so the actor's self-regard merges with the character's. If some viewers still don't know whether to take the words of these hyperintellectual prattlers seriously or to laugh at them and regard them as poseurs, well, it doesn't matter: You can laugh at them, and it doesn't diminish the movie. They're good characters, restless and alive. Smart enough. And, of course, in love—so you forgive them much.

Linklater is no George Bernard Shaw: He doesn't give the ideas a life of their own. But he does give them a dramatic context, and he sets them off as well as any filmmaker this side of Rohmer. Those long takes in which the camera travels behind Celine and Jesse as they talk and talk and talk, trying to cram it all in: It's both exhausting and exhilarating.

So why isn't Before Sunset as intoxicating—and as squirm-inducing—as Before Sunrise? Because the thing itself, the connection, has happened. Because going back, in this case, isn't as much of a thrill as going forward—especially when there's a wife and child off-screen to muddy the issue morally. Because it's sad that all those years were lost because these idiots didn't just exchange phone numbers. (There's an indictment of youthful romanticism for you!) Jesse and Celine do apparently have a future, but the arc of the movie is Proustian and infused with melancholy and loss. Time doesn't go forward again until the last two words.

Jesse and Celine made an appearance—in animated form—in a segment of Linklater's Waking Life (2001): I guess that conversation is supposed to happen after the events of Before Sunset. Waking Life is a philosophical cartoon about rejecting time (say, a plane about to leave) and surrendering to the moment (say, the love of one's life swaying provocatively to Nina Simone): For all the existential trappings, it's a dreamily romantic, forever-young kind of message. Part of me is a little disappointed that Linklater didn't find a way to test the sacred moment between Celine and Jesse by showing the evolution of their relationship instead of just hitting the "restart" button and working his way back to it. But I'm not going to carp too much. How often do you get a chance to live something beautiful again?