Hello Young Lovers - Part Deux

Rating: Null/10 (21 July 2004)

I was surprised how many in the audience of "Before Sunset" had not seen the previous "Before Sunrise" as I didn't think it was possible to follow it, let alone appreciate the dialogue, stand-alone.
This "Part Deux," as it takes place in instantly recognizable Paris, contains less explanatory flashback material than the consequently essential trailer did, as the premise for the movie is a specific "what if?" portend of future potential regret that Ethan Hawke's Jesse used to seduce Julie Delpy's Celine for a night around Vienna almost ten years ago. How can someone who hasn't seen the first film judge the tricks memory may be playing on each character if you don't know what you remember really happened?
It is a wonderful premise and creative writing collaboration among director Richard Linklater and the stars to have the characters revisited in the real time of being older in a real time conversation that is filmed a la Eric Rohmer, like his "Les Rendez-vous de Paris."
The movie carries an additional subtext that shadows the characters and adds to the complexity. Back in 1995, Hawke was at his most earnestly, shaggily adorable and Delpy was an up-and-coming starlet. But now we've seen Hawke rise to an Oscar nomination, as well as a novelist like Jesse, while becoming tabloid fodder for the break-up of his family with Uma Thurman, and he bears a gaunt, haunted, shorn look.
Delpy has during this time only surfaced occasionally to American audiences, so that her strong, luminous character here is particularly captivating and believable as a professional activist as well as a songwriter (quite sweet on the soundtrack and probably on her own CD, too) and you simply can't take your eyes off her. She nicely counters the image of her delicate beauty with frank exchanges and well-kicked profanity.
Elements of the premise have been done to exaggerated comic effect in the Western satire "From Noon Till Three" Neil Simon's "Same Time Next Year" and "The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions barbares)," but this feels natural.

Where the earlier movie had the charm of a late night, dorm room bull session resonant of the potentials of youth, this one is an amusing probing of protective defenses to honestly reveal thwarted, older and trying to be wiser expectations as they circle each other to consider once again grabbing what could be the brass ring amidst the complicated real lives they have built.
This ending is as deliciously open-ended as the first and I look forward to revisiting Jesse and Celine ten years hence.