Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
I was advised to wait two years between Sunrise and Sunset... well, six months isn't that bad, right ?
Obviously it's not too bad, because I liked this even more than Sunrise. I'm very impressed by the way Jesse and Celine pick up right where they left off, though the nature of their conversations is very different. In Sunrise, they're philosophizing about the world, the nature of time, God etc. What little there is of that here is much more down-to-earth,; and they mostly end up talking about their actual, practical life and the way they've been affected by their missed connection a decade earlier. There are a few things that make this better than Sunrise to me, but one of them is that I felt the process of Jesse falling in love with Celine all over again much more acutely than in Sunrise, and I don't know if it's me liking Céline more in her thirties or the connection simply being more profound this time around, or if it's Ethan Hawke's performance that got better... it's probably a combination of these things really, and everything generally being more meaningful because there's that weight of what happened before hanging over the film. It's no longer a discovery of each other, it's a realization of something that feels obvious.
Part of it is also the real time nature of it. Linklater constrains himself much more than in Sunrise, where he had a whole night for his story: as such, their conversation is slightly more intense than it probably would be realistically... but it works, and I think that's because of Linklater's directing. I was reminded of Victoria: there are many cuts here, but the film feels of one piece because of that real time element. It's breathless (hah) in a way, we're there with them for those 80 minutes, and there's something exhilarating to that. The more I think about it, the more it seems obvious to me that they're also simply better, deeper performances on both sides here, maybe because Delpy takes control of the film in some ways, with Hawke spending a lot of time reacting to her, which he's great at.
In any case, this is simply wonderful. It's funny that there are so many films now trying to take characters we know and love and give us more of them in the hopes of solliciting an emotional reaction, but none of them get the effect that Linklater gets here. Probably because seeing Han Solo and Leia thirty years after is nice and all, but those movies aren't about their relationship really, it's just an element of them. Because Linklater makes these intimate films, the the effect of seeing them reunited is much stronger, and there's also the fact that it's so relatable: even if most of us haven't had any experience as romantic as Before Sunrise, we've ran into people we hadn't seen in a long time, or thought about what might happen if we would at the very least. Linklater, Delpy and Hawke, who really do feel like co-authors here, get that completely right, and the way their priorities shift from Sunrise to Sunset, from the big ideas to the disillusionment and need to deal with reality, that all makes for a very powerful experience.
9/10