Disappointment from an otherwise great director

Rating: Null/10 (13 October 2003)

Disappointing to find that I don't like all of Richard Linklater's films. All of his others rock.
I got the feeling from this that Celine could only have been interested in Jesse because of his looks, since he sure was a dead-end intellectual poser conversationally. The conversations real people have in such situations are more interesting and much more entertaining. If you buy this as "real", you haven't done much traveling. If you made lame attempts at conversation like this with a foreign girl who took an interest to you, she would run for cover and not think twice. At first Celine seems real enough, but since she seems to enjoy Jesse's inanity, you can only assume she must be as vacuous as him. And this premise that he didn't have enough money for a hotel or even a bottle of wine... Maybe if he didn't blow his money eating in the friggin' dining car on an Austrian train. If this was real life and real people, those two would have gone and seen the avant-garde play, their new-found Viennese actor friends would show them a great time afterwards, and then the couple would be invited to spend the night in someone's guest bedroom where Celine and Jesse would conjugate the French verb "baiser" all night long. The plot is unrealistic and painfully boring, and the dialogue makes you want to dope slap both of them. Julie Delpy, quit hanging out with twits just cuz their cute. Ethan Hawke, go home.