Before Sunset (2004)
Directed by Richard Linklater
Nine years later, Jesse travels across Europe giving readings from a book he wrote about the night he spent in Vienna with Celine. After his reading in Paris, Celine finds him, and they spend part of the day together before Jesse has to again leave for a flight. They are both in relationships now, and Jesse has a son, but as their strong feelings for each other start to return, both confess a longing for more.
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17 films that influenced Before Sunset
What critics say influenced Before Sunset
But if this scripted literal "conversation piece" by and between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory made for a convenient punchline, a shorthand for artistic snobbery, it was also acutely self-aware and just as much thought-provoking, offering a progressive cinematic paradigm that would later sustain pictures like Richard Linklater's Before series (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight).
What ensues is an ambulatory My Dinner With André for lovers -- a captivating and seamless discussion in which Jesse and Celine unravel the past while flirting with romantic possibility.
The story of a young American (Ethan Hawke) and a beautiful French jeune fille (Julie Delpy) who meet on a train and slip into a deep-thought conversation with an intensely sexual subtext, it was like a non-platonic My Dinner With Andre, a romantic daydream distilled to 190 proof: One sip made you reel.
Think My Dinner with Andre, but with better looking stars in a more photogenic surrounding.
In 1981 Louis Malle made the successful "My Dinner With Andre," wherein two old friends sit and talk and talk and talk over dinner.
It was also that rare American film keener on talk than on plot, a My Dinner With Andre in which Andre turned out to be a whip-smart, sexy French babe.
And where Linklater's cinematic models in Before Sunrise were Hollywood love stories such as Vincente Minnelli's The Clock (1945), they're now more French New Wave, Eric Rohmer in particular.
(The kind you see in American movies from World War II, like The Clock (1945) in which Robert Walker as a soldier on leave meets Judy Garland in Penn Station and spends the day with her; the two bond so intensely they get married right away.)
It's next to impossible to view Before Sunrise now without reference to Before Sunset, though not in a way that hurts it; if anything, I am considerably fonder of the original now that I have seen the sequel than I was when I first saw it, at a slightly younger age than the characters themselves.
Read my review of the 2004 sequel "Before Sunset"…
In Days of Being Wild and Slacker, Ashes of Time and TheNewton Boys, Happy Together and Dazed and Confused, and In the Mood for Love and Before Sunrise they're especially astute observers of where and who we are in history.
July 1, 2004 - Almost 10 years after they made Before Sunrise, the trio of director Richard Linklater and actors Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke return to the realm of the beguiling, intimate romantic comedy/drama.
This would be Richard Linklater's lovely Before Sunrise (1995), which, after taking in only $5.5 million in North American theaters, became a cult movie among home viewers in a fairly short time.
Jesse keeps cheating his time limit, calling his limo driver to meet them at the end of a boat ride that heightens the romantic and erotic tension the same way Stanley Donen did with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade, by alternating water, air, light and shadow under a series of bridges.
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In Days of Being Wild and Slacker, Ashes of Time and TheNewton Boys, Happy Together and Dazed and Confused, and In the Mood for Love and Before Sunrise they're especially astute observers of where and who we are in history.
With such early films as "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused," and more recently with the animated feature "Waking Life," the Austin-based director has become known for a discursive filmmaking style that favors words -- lots and lots of them -- over pictures.
Consider his surprisingly amusing "Slacker" (1991), his insightful "Dazed and Confused" (1993), followed by his tepid "Newton Boys" (1998), the pretentious and boring "Waking Life" (2001), and then the energetic and funny "School of Rock" (2003).
Romantic relationships don't get filmed any better than Richard Linklater's ("Slacker"/"Dazed and Confused"/ "Tape") Before Sunset, which is a sequel that matches in quality his wonderfully delirious 1995 Before Sunrise.
Since 1991, when his independent sleeper "Slacker" infiltrated the culture, the writer and director has yielded to a cinematic wanderlust, moving from genre to genre with varying success.
Linklater, whose early films included Slacker and Dazed and Confused as well as Before Sunrise, has always showed a fascination with personality - what makes people tick - and a willingness to trust an audience's intelligence and openness in understanding the complexity and appeal of seemingly ordinary characters.
Whereas Celine and Jesse were tourists in Vienna, killing time in a church or riding the Ferris wheel seen in 1949's The Third Man (one of the earlier film's many unobtrusive allusions), Paris is Celine's hometown.
In Days of Being Wild and Slacker, Ashes of Time and TheNewton Boys, Happy Together and Dazed and Confused, and In the Mood for Love and Before Sunrise they're especially astute observers of where and who we are in history.
As in An Affair to Remember, the uncertain couple agreed to meet in six months — and then didn't, thanks in part to cruel fate.
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Linklater is brilliant in building a narrative around random characters crashing in to one another and connecting and he exercises a lot in future films like “Before Sunset” and “Waking Life.”
He's at his best in "Slacker," "Before Sunrise," "Tape" and "Before Sunset."
In Days of Being Wild and Slacker, Ashes of Time and TheNewton Boys, Happy Together and Dazed and Confused, and In the Mood for Love and Before Sunrise they're especially astute observers of where and who we are in history.
With such early films as "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused," and more recently with the animated feature "Waking Life," the Austin-based director has become known for a discursive filmmaking style that favors words -- lots and lots of them -- over pictures.
Consider his surprisingly amusing "Slacker" (1991), his insightful "Dazed and Confused" (1993), followed by his tepid "Newton Boys" (1998), the pretentious and boring "Waking Life" (2001), and then the energetic and funny "School of Rock" (2003).
Romantic relationships don't get filmed any better than Richard Linklater's ("Slacker"/"Dazed and Confused"/ "Tape") Before Sunset, which is a sequel that matches in quality his wonderfully delirious 1995 Before Sunrise.
He is also a novelist and director of the independent films Straight to One and Chelsea Walls.