Before Sunset (2004)
I'll be upfront: I went into this one already rattled. I absolutely loathed Before Sunrise, the 1995 original, where two insufferably wide-eyed twenty-somethings wander around Vienna trying to extract grand philosophical meaning from every stray dog and overheard conversation. It was a complete chore. So when Richard Linklater's 2004 follow-up arrived, set nine years later, I sat down with my arms firmly crossed and my expectations somewhere around the floor. What I got was, to my genuine surprise, not quite as bad. But "not quite as bad" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there.
To give credit where it's due: Before Sunset is a step up, and the reason is fairly simple. Jesse and Celine, played again by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, have actually aged. They're carrying a bit of damage now, a bit of disappointment, and the script is at least interested in that weight rather than the performative wonder of their younger selves. When they meet again in a Parisian bookshop, there's a genuine tension in the air, the awkwardness of two people who made each other a promise once and are now trying to work out what on earth they're supposed to do with each other. That much works.
The problem, and it's a persistent one, is the dialogue. I know the critical consensus treats these rapid-fire, intellectually charged exchanges as some kind of gold standard for "authentic" screen conversation. I just don't buy it. This doesn't sound like two people who haven't seen each other in nearly a decade. It sounds like two people who've been given very long, very polished speeches and told to perform them at pace. Real reunion conversations are messy, halting, full of wrong turns and trailing sentences. This isn't that. It's theatrical in a way that kept pulling me out of the moment, however lovely the Paris streets looked behind them.
My feelings on the two leads are, I'll admit, pretty divided. Hawke is genuinely good here. He plays Jesse with a quiet, grounded regret that feels earned, and there's a real believability to the way he carries the years between the two films. He anchors the whole thing. Delpy is a different matter. I found her delivery grating, disconnected from anything resembling the natural rhythm of how people actually speak, and Celine as written is remarkably self-centred. She dominates every exchange, constantly steering the conversation back to her own grievances, her own worldview, her own feelings. The film seems to read this as passionate and magnetic. I mostly read it as exhausting. You're watching Jesse navigate what feels less like a romantic reunion and more like a one-sided interrogation, which makes the much-praised chemistry feel rather lopsided.
And then there's the ending. I won't spell out the exact final image, but the suggestion is that Jesse might stay in Paris, miss his flight home, let the whole afternoon tip over into something more permanent. The film frames this as romantic, even triumphant. But Jesse has a wife. He has a young child. The film is almost wilfully blind to the moral weight of what it's implying. Framing a man potentially abandoning his family as a grand, sweeping gesture of the heart isn't romantic to me. It's a staggering act of selfishness dressed up in soft lighting and Nina Simone, and Linklater seems entirely uninterested in reckoning with that. It left me deeply unsatisfied, and not in the productive, thought-provoking way that a good ambiguous ending can.
So where does that leave us? Before Sunset is a more mature, more focused film than its predecessor, and Hawke gives it a genuine emotional core. But the pretension hasn't fully gone away, the script still sounds like it admires itself rather too much, and the finale mistakes selfishness for romance in a way I found genuinely irritating. It's occasionally engaging and visually lovely, but it's also frequently frustrating.
Two and a half stars. The completionist in me says I should see Before Midnight. The rest of me is looking for distractions.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2004 | Watched: 2026-07-21
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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