sunset

Rating: 9/10 (7 October 2005)

move more quickly because they can tell the other person what they're thinking under the guise of telling a third person. They don't have time to mess around with each other's minds. If the attraction that they feel isn't mutual, it's not like the next day things will change. They won't even see each other the next day. It's a way to be sure that they're still on the same page romantically and the scene works perfectly.
There are others great tidbits--including a natural conversation about past lovers over a pinball machine, a guy playing a harpsichord, a ferris wheel ride, when they say 'goodbye' early in the evening to avoid it later--I mean, so many. Most of these scenes are edited in long, single takes, that can't help but feel realistic. There are no quick cuts in real life.
I can't stress enough how everyone should see this. There is no big sex scene. At the end of the film, we're not sure what exactly happened between them and we don't know if they'll ever see each other again. There are arguments for every position. But for those few hours in Vienna, the couple do exactly what we all wish we had the courage to do.
This film gets better the older I get. It is so much smarter than the other boy-meets-girl films that we've been forced to sit through in the past ten years.