Love is all you need.

Rating: 9/10 (17 December 2013)

Before Sunrise was a date movie- a boy and a girl meets and talks about love, life, their experiences and their interpretations. They talk and talk. Both wary of love, but still falling for each other. It had those smart great dialogues that make for an absorbing patient watch. In their conversations I found my own philosophy, my own search for soulmate and my own dilemmas. But there was something amiss there. A proper narratively structured story was missing, yes, but what the movie was really deficient was in its aloofness. It muses about ideas of love and life and they even lay bare their personal lives to each other, but what was missing was the translation of that anguish, of that hurt, of that disappointment in the wordings of their dialogues and mannerisms. It is like they are trying to reach a diagnosis in that clinical detached sort of way and this may be an appropriate treatment given the circumstances of the movie, but that was very off putting for me. Now coming to Before Sunset, it is everything that its predecessor was and much more. It takes place nine years after their first encounter with each other. He is the author of a best selling novel on a book tour in Paris. She stays in Paris and works for a cause. They meet in the morning and he has a flight to catch in the evening. So starts their second date. It starts initially with their cool detachment to the growing love between them, more so as they are left bitter by their love lives though their professional lives are in a much better state, but you could see in their mannerisms and dialogues their anguish and their pain and their longing for each other. A look here and there. A word here and there. You could feel that. And then in the second half where this facade of coolness bursts open and they for the first time really talk their heart out, you really get to know them and feel them and care for them. These are two vulnerable people charred with their bitter and disappointing experiences in the matters of heart trying to come in terms with loneliness and their elusive search for 'the one' and their anger and frustration to keep up their appointment. The screenplay credit is shared by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke along with Richard Linklater. And since both Delpy and Hawke were going through tumultuous relationships, you could read their notes of sufferings and pain in the dialogues they deliver. That added to the movie that sort of realism that was missing in the predecessor. SPOILERS AHEAD. There are two things that I am dying to mention here. First is the look that Julie Delpy gives now and then and more frequently in the second half to Ethan Hawke when he is not conscious of them. That look is the most painful and beautiful thing ever. That look says it all. And the second is the ending. The ending is just wow. WOW!! He is there sitting on the sofa looking at her and smiling. She is right there in front of him but not facing him and dancing slowly to a beautiful song. He knows there is a flight to catch. She reminds him of that playfully. But he is still smiling and she is still dancing. What an ending. Wow. SPOILERS OVER. Before Sunset is a movie that is for everybody who has fallen in love, is about to or has always wondered about it. It speaks to the heart, expresses the dilemma, but does not answer the question. It is funny and sad how the protagonists are trying to be real in their expectations, but are actually craving that idealism. Don't we all want that perfect soulmate that we hear it in all the fairy tale ending stories? So who am I to blame them?! Keep hoping, Jesse and Celine. And that was what the ending was about-an instillation of optimism in our hearts for that fairy tale ending.