Sunrise, Sunset

BY THE TIME IT GETS DARK: Hawke and Delpy watch the sun go down.

Before Sunset's unlikely reunion is a voyage of discovery.

by Cindy Fuchs

"Isn't everything autobiography? We all see the world through our own tiny keyhole." Holding forth in Paris' Shakespeare & Co. about his novel, This Time, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is doing his best to avoid naming which parts are true and which are made up. Reporters attending this last stop on his book tour persist, earnestly seeking to delineate fact from fiction. He's more interested in thinking through a theory of time in which seemingly distinct moments occur simultaneously.

And at that moment, he spots her. Celine (Julie Delpy) stands apart from his audience and smiles gloriously, looking nearly the same as when he last saw her, in Before Sunrise, the movie where director Richard Linklater and co-writers Hawke and Delpy originally conjured the characters. On their first meeting some nine years ago, Jesse and Celine spent a night walking around Vienna, falling in love, and promising to meet again six months later. Feeling tenuous about the seeming fate that brought them together, they decided not to exchange numbers or any other contact information, in the belief that if they were meant to be together, they would each make the trip that would ensure their union. Now, in Before Sunset, they spend a day in Paris, falling in love all over again.

Their 1995 encounter is memorable for its considerable low-budget charms. Linklater essentially followed his actors as they wandered from place to place and subject to subject, discussing literature, philosophy, their own unformed desires and their weirdly elemental, utterly unexpected romance. They met again, whimsically, in Linklater's Waking Life, where their animated selves woke in an Austin, Texas, bedroom and continued, sort of, the conversation they shared in Vienna.

In Before Sunset, Celine and Jesse again face limits, in the form of his 7:30 flight from De Gaulle (he's on his way back to a wife and 4-year-old son in New York), as well as their own complicated feelings for each other. Both are leaner, weathered, sadder-seeming. On the one hand, each has fantasized the other, projecting ideals and frustrations. On the other, they've lived their own lives (she's an environmental activist, currently involved with a world-traveling, often absent photographer), so their frozen-in-time images of each other aren't entirely accurate.

Yet their desire to know, to define and understand the brief time they shared, has shaped the rest of their lives. With the floaty perfection of the first film lingering in viewers' minds, the sequel offers an intriguing investigation of the ways that reminiscing reshapes both past and present. Jesse's novel similarly reworks their meeting in Venice, in ways that Celine calls "flattering and disturbing at the same time." It's strange, she says, to be "part of someone else's memory," especially as that memory is reshaped in fiction. (You never know what he has written, only that his editor nixed a last-chapter reunion.)

At times, their re-evaluations are comic, as when Celine can't seem to recall whether they had sex in Venice. (Jesse is, understandably, distressed by her memory lapse.) And sometimes they're poignant, as when Jesse confesses that when he was in a taxi en route to his own wedding in NYC, he imagined he saw Celine on a corner. (She reveals that she attended NYU, which, in fact, Delpy did.)

Their initial dynamic — shaped by Celine's curiosity and optimism and Jesse's resentment — changes as they talk. If he never forgot her, or let go of the possibility of their reunion, she immersed herself in her work, which she describes as a "process of helping others be in the moment." It is also a job, of course, and her time in a Mexican or Indian village isn't always so transcendent. Relieved to hear that Jesse is not "one of those Freedom Fries type of Americans," she's also annoyed at his self-interested apathy. "Let me break the news to you," she scolds, "The world is a mess right now." And so is she, in her way. When she eventually confesses the effects of their first meeting, she surprises even herself with her candor and upset.

As they walk through the Latin Quarter or along the Seine, the camera tends to move with Celine and Jesse, following behind, hovering ahead of them, anticipating and awaiting their course. Occasionally cutting between them in a standard conversational rhythm, the camera more often observes and allows their conversation to shape the visual scheme: They remain framed but rarely stay still. Taking place in more or less "real time" (the 80-some minutes they spend together is the film's running time), Before Sunset is itself a process. Lyrical and unusual, pondering as it seems to meander, it permits discovery, yours as much as Celine or Jesse's.