When Jesse and Celine first met in the mid 90’s, their few hours together in Vienna were spontaneous and life-altering. Nine years later, lightning strikes twice. They unexpectedly meet in Paris… and have only one fading afternoon to decide if they should share their tomorrows.

“Were you there in Vienna, in December?” Celine asks this of Jesse early in their talk. Nine years have passed since the two of them met, and it was somewhat ambiguous as to what became of them. Celine and Jesse met on a train, spent the day walking the streets of Vienna, talking, and then went their separate ways. Here, they meet in Paris, where Celine lives and where Jesse is visiting on a book tour. Paris is the last city Jesse is to visit, and he and Celine find themselves again with only so much time before he has to catch his flight back to the States.

Much has changed in the years since Jesse and Celine first met. The world has changed, and we are not living in the optimistic times that characterized the mid-1990’s. Celine and Jesse are in their 30’s now. They have made commitments, and are set enough in their lives to have lost the feeling that everything is possible. Their experiences have changed the way they behave with each other. Both are wary of revealing too much, and they lead up to revealing the details of their lives slowly. Their conversation is rushed; they have so much they want to squeeze in and so little time in which to do it.

Not only is the acting superb, but Before Sunset is also quite a technical achievement. Linklater filmed the movie in long takes, six and seven minutes, on the streets of a busy city. The actors take their scripted dialogue – written by Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy – and make it sound spontaneous, natural. The metafictional layers to this film are remarkable. As we quickly learn, the novel that Jesse has written bares such a close relationship to what happened on that day in Vienna that the lines between fiction and reality are blurred.

Likewise, the lines between Jesse/Celine and Hawke/Delpy are blurred. Hawke, himself the author of two novels, lived in New York at a time when Delpy was studying at NYU. Celine was studying at NYU when Jesse was living in the city. He thinks he saw her at a diner once. She lived in the neighborhood, she knew the diner; maybe he did. Little touches like this, which might not even occur to the average viewer, add a layer of honesty to the film so that if it feels real, it is because it is. The lines are blurred, but that is not to say that the two actors are playing themselves. They are two people, feeling things that we all feel and so rarely ever talk about: “There are so many things I want to do,” says Celine, “and I end up doing not much.” They speculate that they might be nothing more than characters in a dream – interesting because in Linklater’s earlier Waking Life Jesse and Celine were characters in a dream. The layers only get deeper.

Jesse and Celine do not confess. They build up to things slowly, Celine a bit more so than Jesse. He seems eager to get things off his chest, while she is more inclined to hold back. It is only in the end that we realize how much their first meeting meant to her. I will not go any further into the ending here, except to say that it is one of the great cinematic endings of all time, full of ambiguity and promise and hope. There is material here for a long series of films. It would be interesting to come back to these characters every ten years to see how they have grown, what they have learned, what they have gained and lost.

This is a better film than Before Sunrise, no doubt because the characters are older, more experienced, and wiser. Things are more ambiguous. Just as Jesse had to catch the train in Vienna, the time when his plane is to leave draws closer and closer. “You are gonna miss that plane,” Celine tells him, but Jesse does what we all might do: extends the moment for one more cigarette, one more song, one more cup of tea, one more…

Before Sunset is presented here in the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio. The transfer is beautiful, perfectly capturing the superb cinematography. The colors are perfect, and the overall picture is sharp.

This DVD offers language tracks in both English and French, both in Dolby 5.1 Surround. The presentation is crisp, and everything comes through clearly.

On the set of Before Sunset: An interesting behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film and the collaboration between Linklater, Hawke and Delpy.

Theatrical trailer: The original trailer.

The material here is interesting, but this DVD is screaming for a commentary track, and the absence of one is quite noticeable.