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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. (Criterion)
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The cleverly written dialogues are brilliantly delivered by both Ethan Hawke and his partner Julie Delpy. The film avoids sentimentality and romantic clichés, it captivated me with its simplicity and naturalness, while remaining interesting every second.
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When those two look at each other, you immediately know that this will be beautiful. Those two simply fit perfectly together and their meeting is magnificent. After nine years, they see each other for the first time, after she didn't fulfill her promise and wasn't at the place where they were supposed to meet for six months. However, he came. After nine years, they have the opportunity to talk again and to say what they want. Both of them are incredibly believable, the camera lets them speak, it walks in front of them as they walk through Paris, capturing their words as if it were capturing the meeting of two real people who haven't seen each other in nine years. A beautiful romance. Beautiful.
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I saw it shortly after the end of Before Sunrise, and at first, I was a little scared that they wouldn't be able to recreate the atmosphere. Fortunately, every sentence spoken gains meaning over time, every casual conversation can take on a different dimension, and suddenly Celine says, "Because of that damn book..." and I break down into molecules just like Jesse. The second watching elevates Linklater's work to unforgettable and, in its more mature but no less magical storytelling spirit, is able to grasp the viewer and fill them to the brim with emotions and experiences.
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I have the opposite experience with Linklater's film trilogy than most other viewers. I didn't watch the first part and I gave the second a chance, but I didn't find any great enchantment in it, and it was only the last part that really interested me. With the exception of the opening scene in the bookstore, Before Sunset can be considered an endless dialogue between two people, where the scenery changes only a few times in 80 minutes. I have always liked dialogue-driven films, but here I feel that Linklater is testing the limits of my patience. The conversations between the duo in search of each other in the second part are not as narratively banal as in the first, but I don't find any depth in them by any means. Overall impression: 55%.
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Before Sunset starts out as a disarming conversational summary of the thoughts I wake up and fall asleep with every day. It later becomes a terribly likeable and scintillating conversational “romance” with an applause-worthy ending. Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are simply divine!
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