Before Sunset Review

Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy wrote it together, largely by email and fax, and shot it in fifteen days for under $3 million, in something close to real time. The form is almost nothing: a bookshop, a café, a walk through the Marais and along the Promenade Plantée, a tourist boat on the Seine, a car, a stairwell. Lee Daniel follows them on Steadicam in takes that run as long as eleven minutes, and the Paris afternoon becomes the clock.

What the talk carries now is regret. Jesse has written a novel about their night and is stuck in an unhappy marriage; Céline has turned the loss into activism and a practiced irony that cracks in the car, the film's most exposed scene. Hawke and Delpy put pieces of their own lives into the writing, and the performances have a nakedness that rehearsal alone does not produce. Roger Ebert and Manohla Dargis both judged it better than Before Sunrise, and the screenplay was nominated for an Oscar. The last scene, in Céline's apartment, is among the great endings in American film, precisely because of where it chooses to stop.