Great start - poor finish!

Rating: 7/10 (28 October 2006)

I saw and liked Before Sunrise when it first came out. It was a watchable romantic-comedy without being exceptional. I only saw it because of limited film choices at that time. I guess I had a broader range of films to see when the sequel Before Sunset came out and only saw it recently because the high IMDb user rating sparked my interest.
First off, it is better than the original. It's been the case with several movies that the sequel bettered the original e.g. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Spider-Man 2, LOTR: Return of the King and (I know I'm stirring up some controversy) The Godfather - 2.
Before Sunset starts out very well. We are given a short and sweet recap on the events of Before Sunrise. You can comfortably watch Sunset without having seen the original. We then have Celine and Jesse walking through Paris chatting and catching up on their lives. They also take a short boat ride on the Seine and eventually a car ride to Celine's flat while continuing their conversation.
The entire film is a conversation between two people with no action. What makes the film unique is that the conversation sounds very natural, the kind of conversation two normal, intelligent people who click would have. That, plus the beauty of Paris makes this very viewable and romantic. We have a bombshell or two dropped along the way about what the two have been up to in the past nine years. It adds to audience interest and the complexity of where they find themselves vis-a-vis each other.
Sunset comes badly undone in the last 10 minutes. The moment Celine starts singing "Let me sing you a waltz" and mimicking Nina Simone, the film nosedives. The conversation becomes unreal and forced where throughout the movie it had seemed so natural. The ending was a cop-out. The story needed to find an end and me being a noir fan, you can guess what end I would have preferred.