Before Sunset (2004)
Before Sunset (2004) — Before Sunrise is an amazing beautiful romantic movie and it has a perfect ambiguous ending. Your interpretation of that ending can almost sum up what kind of person you are. So why, oh why, would writer/director Richard Linklater, and writer/actors Ethan Hawke & Julie Delpy endeavor to make a sequel, eliminating the beautiful ambiguity? Because they’re just that good, that’s why. Before Sunset is set nine years after Jesse and Celine’s night in Vienna in the first film. It commits the unpardonable sin of actually telling us what happened to the characters instead of leaving it to the romanticism or cynicism of our imaginations. Before Sunrise was a movie about idealistic youth and romance with people in their early 20s. In Before Sunset Jesse and Celine are now in their early 30s. How do you reconcile that kind of romantic/idealistic view of life with adulthood? The movie takes a more mature perspective without at all detracting from everything that made the first film great. In fact they seem to have brought all the great dialogue and emotional resonance to this sequel as well. It’s one of those sequels that is as good as the original (where the original was good enough that that actually means something).
