But though it is sometimes maddening, the movie's prodigious verbiage is also enthralling, precisely because of its casual disregard for the usual imperatives of screenwriting.Ĭan't these people just get to the point, you may find yourself wondering, stealing a glance at your watch. Hawke, is both rambling and self-conscious, and at times it has the self-important sound of clever writing. The script of ''Before Sunset,'' which Mr. More often than not, his films - from ''Slacker'' to ''Waking Life'' - are structured according to open-ended, syncopated rhythms of conversation. It is hard to think of another English-language director with such a voracious ear for talk. Were they meant to be together? And if they were, what does it mean that, until now, they have not been together?
The questions that have nagged at them for almost a decade, and that give this modest, meandering movie an undercurrent of desperate suspense, are whether there is a chance for something more, and whether the chance was lost forever on that morning in Vienna. Their experiences have left them stranded in a familiar limbo between resignation and contentment.
None of it is terribly remarkable - professional success, parenthood, an unhappy marriage, a series of unsatisfying relationships - which is the point: then as now, Jesse and Celine, for all their idiosyncrasies, are meant to be perfectly ordinary citizens of the affluent, entitled West. In the ensuing years, Celine and Jesse have lived through some of the frustrations and satisfactions of adulthood, which emerge as they wander from bookstore to cafe, through picturesque alleys and onto the deck of a tourist boat. But time also exerts a graver, less literal pressure on the film. Jesse has to be at the airport to catch a plane home to New York at 7:30, and the 80 minutes of ''Before Sunset'' approach this deadline with anxious leisure. Delpy's chirpy good cheer has acquired an edge of weariness, but Jesse and Celine are still as charming, and still, to everyone but each other, as exasperating as ever. Hawke's face has lost the last traces of its pretty, pouty softness, and Ms. Celine, who has read Jesse's book, arrives at Shakespeare & Company at the end of his reading, and they spend the next hour or so catching up, recalling their earlier encounter and also, warily, reliving it. Jesse has written a novel about their affair - a ''tiny best seller,'' he modestly gloats - and Paris is the last leg of his European publicity tour.
''Before Sunset'' reunites Jesse and Celine, still played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, in a bookstore in Paris.
Nine years later - the summer of 2003 in their time, right now in ours - those arguments will be settled, and some new ones will begin. Linklater's chronicle of Jesse and Celine's long one-night stand came out, in 1995, many a couple left the theater wondering whether that next meeting ever took place. They concluded their tryst with the promise to meet again six months later, and when ''Before Sunrise,'' Mr. I still have no memory of what I was doing on that date, but I was glad to be reminded that Jesse and Celine, a hyper-articulate young American traveler and an equally verbal French student, spent the night wandering through the streets of Vienna, chattering their way through one of the more charming and exasperating screen romances of the decade. Until I saw ''Before Sunset,'' Richard Linklater's prickly, enchanting new film, I had forgotten all about June 16, 1994.