Directed by Richard Linklater • 2004 • United States
Starring Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
In the breathtaking follow-up to BEFORE SUNRISE, Celine tracks down Jesse, now an author, at the tail end of his book tour in Paris, with only a few hours left before he is to board a flight back home to the States. Meeting almost a decade after their short-lived romance in Vienna, the pair find their chemistry rekindled by increasingly candid exchanges about professional setbacks, marital disappointments, and the compromises of adulthood. Impelled by an urgent sense of the transience of human connection, BEFORE SUNSET remains Richard Linklater’s most seductive experiment with time’s inexorable passage and the way love can seem to stop it in its tracks.
“If cinema is the art of time, Linklater is one of its most thoughtful and engaged directors. Unlike with other filmmakers identified as auteurs, Linklater’s distinction is found not on the surface of his films, in a visual style or signature shot, but rather in their DNA, as ongoing conversation...
