“Before Sunset” is a strange document.  There is no satisfying justification for its existence.  Not only was Jesse and Celine’s story rounded off perfectly in “Before Sunrise”, they themselves weren’t even memorable enough to warrant revisiting.  In that movie, as in most of his efforts, especially “Slacker”, Linklater showed off a great ear for conversations and a deficient skill in creating full characters.  What struck a chord in the first film was not how unique they were as people but how recognizable they were as types: youthful, romantic, insecure, daring, full of nonsense borrowed from half-digested schoolbooks.  What Linklater caught in his magic mirror was not a pair of lovers but a rite of passage.

Linklater and his collaborators Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke had another, less attractive rite of passage in mind in “Before Sunset”: the disillusionment of newly-minted thirty-somethings, including the slow descent into compromise, failed dreams, and prosaic social duties.  In short, life as most of us know it.  Linklater, Delpy and Hawke came up with an arresting account of those emotions.  Jesse fell into the wedding trap and hasn’t clawed his way out.  Celine took the road of freedom but arrived at emotional numbness.  Hardly riveting as high drama, but maybe that’s why it’s so fresh.  Their exchanges have an understated brilliance about them, such as when they laughingly own up to the sexual traffic inevitable for their ages.  Witnessing a conversation so realistic it could have been recorded in any of a thousand cities is actually precious. 

And seeing the actors themselves older, naturally aged—Hawke, in particular, looks as though life has thoroughly worked him over—roots the film even deeper in a recognizable reality.  Even when it gets cute, as in the scenes on the boat or when the effervescent Delpy sings a pop song, nothing jumps out as overly artificial.  As well as we come to know her, Celine’s talent is completely believable. The realism is not sustained, however.  Whereas “Before Sunrise” used a loose, open-ended dramatic structure to focus on the chemical reactions between the two lovers, “Before Sunset” throws in some important complications.  Jesse, it turns out, is married and has a young son, Hank.  Given the outcome of the story, that device is excusable, even essential to making the movie’s ending work.  Greater complications are also natural given the fact that these are no longer two kids right out of college. 

Still, the drama feels shoehorned into the script.  The wife and son make for a clunky device, always rushing in to quell the moments of unconventional honesty that keep popping up between Jesse and Celine. The need to introduce stock conflict into the narrative is unlike Linklater, and disappointing.  The intellectual connection between Jesse and Celine devolves into a hackneyed tryst made “romantic” courtesy of Proust: Jesse’s belief in the imagination’s ability to recover lost time, which is proved when his love is triggered by Delpy’s waltz.  Instead of backing away from the idea of a “soul mate”, the movie pokes its toe in the water for an hour and a half and suddenly leaps in.  As good as most of the movie is, the ending is a disservice to the two characters.  The first film depicted the blindness of innocence.  The sequel deals in the hoary deceptions of experience. Whereas “Before Sunrise” ended on a note of light, airy, lovestruck caprice, this one feels as if the characters are pallid human shavings gradually pulled onto the magnet of self-deception.