Before Sunset
Length: 1 hour, 20 minutes
Studio: Warner Independent Pictures
Website: http://wip.warnerbros.com/index.html?site=beforesunset
Release Date: 2004-07-30
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Vernon Dobtcheff, Louise Lemoine Torres, Rodolphe Pauly
Director: Richard Linklater
Screenwriter: Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke
WorkNameSort: Before Sunset
Our Rating: 1.00
p>For an audience of 30-something narcissists set on gilding the memory of their romantically feckless 20s, Before Sunset will be hard to beat. For everyone else, it’s an endurance test of the most trying sort.
Filmed in a fuzzy-focused, sunny glow once reserved for tampon commercials, the movie depends on dialogue co-written by director Richard Linklater and stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy — that’s pure post-bong-hit, faux-heavy pabulum. Which is really bad news in a movie that’s basically one 80-minute-long conversation.
Before Sunset catches up on the two star-crossed lovers introduced in Linklater’s moderately more tolerable Before Sunrise (1995), finding them nine years older but not appreciably wiser. Hawke’s American hunk, Jesse, has become a breezily affluent novelist stuck in a loveless marriage. He’s touring Europe in support of his smasheroo new novel, which is based on his true love affair with Celine (Delpy), a dew-kissed French babe who was a grad student when they met but now works for a nonprofit that’s, like, totally against world hunger.
The two reconnect at a Paris bookshop, where Jesse is fawned over by adoring intellectuals. They immediately set to touring Paris while tossing off smug bons mots concerning globalization, Dubya and the mess in Iraq. (Whoever reviews this film for The Weekly Standard is going to have a rightful field day trashing these worst-case-scenario cartoon liberals.) With the blessed exception of one sequence in which Delpy sings — quite nicely — and thus shuts Hawke the hell up, they do not for one bloody second stop babbling. There is no story.
Romantic comedies used to feature smart characters saying things you wished you’d be clever enough to say in real life. Linklater seems to think we’ll warm to characters who say things we’d say when most full of ourselves while really stoned. Regarding her time spent amidst the misery-wracked denizens of Communist-controlled Warsaw, Celine recalls being “freed from my consumerist frenzy.” Jesse easily trumps her with his whoa-dude hoohaw: “I’ve always felt there was a mystical core to the universe.” That and “I’m older; my problems are deeper” are just two of his greatest hits.
The idea that star-crossed love may be the opium of the callow — that it often results in as much heartache as bliss — never occurs to Linklater. Of course, unfettered romantic fantasy can work just fine. Moulin Rouge! found mileage to burn in the romantic conceit because Baz Luhrmann embraced the melodrama of a damned notion. But Linklater also wants to lay claim to a sort of knee-jerk realism; the same urge to have it both ways marred his School of Rock, in which Jack Black’s zany antics rubbed uncomfortably against the picture’s more serious, adult-y concerns.
Even if one is taken by Hawke’s and Delpy’s charms, there’s never even the twitch of a doubt that these two will join narcissistic forces. That means there’s simply no compelling reason to watch the movie. And despite the stars receiving credit as co-writers, neither Jesse nor Celine possesses a distinctive voice. Ultimately, Before Sunset is as dull as drying paint — little more than the sound of Linklater talking to himself in an echo chamber.
(Opens Friday, July 30, at Regal Winter Park Village Stadium 20)
This article appears in Jul 28 – Aug 3, 2004.