Sunrise, Sunset

I just caught up again with Before Sunset, the sequel to Before Sunrise. Before Sunrise told the story of Jesse, a late teen, early twenty something travelling through Europe. He's on a train and meets up with Celine.

He's planning to fly to the U.S., but before he goes, he wants to spend a day travelling Vienna with Celine. They spend the rest of the day and late into the evening into morning again talking and walking through Vienna.

Linklater's strengths as a filmmaker are not really about plot and a story line that's headed somewhere specific. He's more an observer of human behavior. How do people really fall in love? How do they talk?

This film picks two hyper-literate people and spends an afternoon with them. They are, in many ways, quintessential geeks. They are well-read and try to impress each other with their knowledge.

The film often works best in wordless moments such as when the two of them are trying to avoid noticing that each other is staring at one another. It's a magical experience of optimism, of going to some foreign land, and really connecting with someone else.

For years, the cast had wanted to film a sequel. The first film ends with a promise to meet back in Vienna six months later. The sequel originally planned to pick up at this point.

However, years had passed, and there was a thought that they should pick up ten years afterwards since ten years had passed since the original film was made.

In the intervening time, although both seem superficially happy and content with life, they are not. This becomes an opportunity to rekindle magic that both thought had been lost to them.

There's a greater maturity for both of them. The wide-eye innocence and optimism has been replaced by the realities of growing older in the twenties and dealing with expectations of lives, and as more time has passed, the more magical that one night seems, and the more depressing their current lives are.

Much like the first film, it's about how people talk and communicate, how they try to talk about one thing, but are working their way to say what's really on their mind.

Linklater has even been particularly clever in the opening sequence as he films the places the two will travel in reverse order, as if to suggest that there had been two peaks in their lives: that first evening ten years ago, followed by a valley, followed by a reversal of fortune, and meeting again, and rekindling the magic of that night.

Indeed, when you look back at the first film, Ethan Hawke looks so young, and rather good looking. He's a bit more haggard in this film, though Delpy has become a bit more radiant with age, but they take up where they've left off, with years of experience replacing optimism, and you're transported for the real time of 80 minutes into their world, hyper-sensitive to what they are going through.

These two films are still at the top of my favorites, especially from Linklater.