Before Sunset: A

There is something in Before Sunset, Richard Linklater's sequel to Before Sunrise, that I find so achingly romantic, so true, that not a single note played out over the course of 80 minutes could ever hold the chance of ringing false; to me it is even more resonant than Sunrise - if only for the sheer fact that where Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) were once almost desperately articulate, they are now just desperate (and in that, more real). I once said that as studies go of spontaneous contact, Before Sunrise was nearly perfect. Its successor is perfect; filling in the flaws and expanding its ideas.

After having spent a blissful night of conversation with each other nine years ago, Jesse and Celine parted ways. Now, at a book signing of Jesse's - he's spun a tale off of their shared night - they have the chance to reconnect. Together, with only hours to spare because of Jesse's inevitable flight home, they wander Paris in the afternoon; together the audience wanders with them. Each of them is wiser, older, but they still retain that mesmerizing banter, that immediate connection, that marked them as soulmates from the beginning. The dialogue itself, concocted this time by Linklater as well as Hawke & Delpy, blends wit, insight, and earthiness into a zesty mixture that is hard to forget.

Their journey is chronicled in flowing takes by the camera and it is a camera that proves mighty perceptive; it notices the way that Celine grows skittish as their rendezvous continues or the way that Jesse practically thrums with physical desire. You see, for all of their pent-up innate desire for the other, both of them now maintain a healthy layer of regret with which to cover it. It is a good thing though that these characters are not the same young idealists we fell in love with (that would have broken the spell) yet they aren't jaded mock-ups either (as that would have tainted the memory of the enchantment). Wisely they have instead grown deeper, richer; they both have their scabby emotional scars. They each now jostle cautiously around the other.

Where Before Sunrise was a tale of blossoming love, here is a tale of suspended romance; an affair that materialized only in those brilliantly relized minutes of breathy soulful exchange. Deprived as they were of that for many years, Jesse and Celine have grown cold - their lives now filled with details neither wanted. The meeting they have in Paris is a wake-up call for both, but what would they sacrifice to leave the mundane comfort of sleep? They dance an elegant rhthym around each other of longing, tragedy, and love but can it last? What if it can't? Will it still, as they say, be better to have "danced and lost then never to have danced at all"? It would be sadistic to spoil the subtle emotional complexities that result from this question or the details that unspool in the last moments but know this: these three highly talented thespian-filmmakers remain at the very tip-top of their dizzying romantic game.