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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 3346
Released: November 9, 2004 |
| Our Price: Too low to display |
| Used Price: $1.99 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
A young American man and young French woman meet on a train to Vienna; ten years later, they meet again in Paris.
Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 8-FEB-2005
Media Type: DVD
Description of Before Sunset:
In 1994, director Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Waking Life) made Before Sunrise, a gorgeous poem of a movie about two strangers (played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy) wandering around Vienna, talking, and falling in love. Ten years later, Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy have returned with Before Sunset, which reunites the same characters after Hawke has written a book about that night. Delpy appears at the final book reading of his European tour; they have less than two hours before Hawke has to catch a flight to New York...and in that time, they walk around Paris, talk, and fall in love all over again. It sounds simple, perhaps dull, but it's written with such skill and care and acted with such richness that it's a miracle of filmmaking. On its own, Before Sunset is moving and wonderful; seen right after Before Sunrise, it will break your heart. --Bret Fetzer
Before Sunset Reviews:
Better than the first 
2009-11-03 - I absolutely enjoyed this movie. You must watch the Before Sunrise first. It's more than your typical love story. The intelligent and candid dialogue makes the movie so intriguing and realistic.
Ecstatic
2009-09-26 - Paris, 2003. Jesse, an American writer in his early 30s, is signing books and giving a talk at Shakespeare & Company, the famed Parisian bookseller that first printed "Ulysses" in 1922. The book chronicles a one-night stand nearly a decade earlier that he just can't get out of his mind. As he is about to finish, he locks eyes for a moment on a particular face in the stacks: Celine, the woman he met nine years before on a summer night in Vienna. For anyone who has seen and loved BEFORE SUNRISE, the film chronicling that meeting, the moment of recognition in this sequel comes as an all-time great moment in cinema...five minutes in, and I knew I was in the presence of greatness.
Celine and Jesse go for a cup of coffee at a café, traversing a half-dozen windy, ancient Parisian streets, and they talk about careers and education, what has led them to this place. Interestingly enough, the dialog was largely scripted by the actors, and they both express (non-acting) interests that mirror the real lives of Hawke (a successful novelist) and Delpy (an environmental activist and musician who has recorded a couple of albums); they also play to their ages and they play characters that are reasonably successful in the outward sense, so a great aura of realism is maintained with little effort. This allows the dialog to ebb and flow, to continue easily for the 80 minute duration of this real-time walk through the streets and gardens of Paris, through life, career, love, lust, politics.
And it all may seem very boring to you, if what you expect is "drama" and "event"; if you expect your romances to be full of sex and unbelievable situations and jealousy and hysteria. BEFORE SUNSET is 80 minutes of two very intelligent, articulate people reacquainting themselves with each other, reawakening to youthful aspirations and romantic hopes that they assumed were withering. It's a paean to French ideals and American excesses, to Paris and to music and to architecture and literature, all conveyed in the expressions and words of two hopeless romantics and in the passion their director has for the noble idea, so rarely practiced, of the importance and power of each day, each hour, each minute of life.
I'm going on a bit perhaps, but I cannot think of a more "real", knowing film about love, about the lost past and the hopeful future than this minimalist tour through the eyes of a brazen Texan and a talkative Parisian. It's easy for me to fall in love with actresses, but Julie Delpy is simply unbelievable here and I've rarely felt more jealous in a movie than I did of Ethan Hawke (who I rarely like, but is as perfect here as he was in the earlier film).
There are many wonderful allusions to film history in this hour and a third but the most potent is the short cruise down the Seine near the end, which brings to mind most obviously two of the most romantic and expressionist films in French history, Vigo's L'ATALANTE (1934) and Carax' LES AMANTS DU PONT NEUF (1991). I was wondering if this film would end there, but instead the couple detours to Celine's apartment for the stunning, very appropriate finale.
Along with it's predecessor, one of the very greatest films about falling in love - an re-falling - in the history of cinema.
IT SUCKS 
2009-07-18 - It flat out sucks and is boring as hell. Just 80 minutes of blah blah which we just fast forwarded through.
A great film to watch with your spouse
2009-07-05 - It's not often that a sequel, especially one made nearly a decade later, is every bit as satisfying as a very good original, but this one manages it. The two twenty-somethings, one American and one French, who spent an entire night wandering around Vienna in the mid-'90s, and slowly falling almost-in-love, have run into each other again in Paris. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is now a published novelist, his book being a fictional account of that amazing night a decade before. Celine (Julia Delpy) seeks him out at a book signing and the two have a few hours to catch up with each other before Jesse has to catch a plane back to his wife and son in New York. You really have to have seen Before Sunrise to understand much of their conversation -- which they pick up almost as if they had never stopped -- but the dialogue is extremely human and therefore very affecting. Is Jesse happy with his life? He says so, at first -- but maybe not, given the subject of his novel. And why has Celine never found a permanent relationship? And did either of them keep their six-months-later appointment in Vienna? As before, the city itself -- Paris, this time -- is the third major character in the story. A lovely and romantic film.
Only one major beef with a great film ...
2009-07-02 - Ok, I finally had to weigh in on Before Sunset. Along with Before Sunrise, it is an outstanding film and probably the stronger of the two for the genuine honesty that is expressed throughout. You really can believe that two people would actually talk and feel the way these characters do.
Here's my only beef with the story... I had a tough time swallowing Celine's excuse for making no attempt to contact Jesse at the train station where they were supposed to have met after the first film. Sure, I know her grandmother died and they didn't have each other's phone numbers, etc., but isn't this the same grandmother Celine described in the first film as having lost the love of her life and accepting her "fate".
I can't believe that her parents, assuming she confided in them, wouldn't have helped her work something out to see Jesse and maybe even have him come along to Budapest with her late to the funeral. At the very least she could have called the train station and paid a messenger of some sort to look for him and get a message to him. She appeared the most eager, until Jesse's short speech at the end of the first film, to actually connect again. If they were as in love as they appeared to be, which the second film confirms, I can't imagine Celine not doing everything she could to try and make contact with him. If not in person, at least with a message. My wife even commented that she would have made the effort to find me given similar circumstances.
Yes, yes, I know it's just a movie and they had to come up with some type of situation to explain why there was no connection on that day nine years ago. I probably could have bought it more if Celine had tried to get a message to him at the station and the messenger was unable to get it to him or missed him somehow. That would have added some great dialogue to the script and given Jesse at least the knowledge that she had tried, as he had. It still would have been tragic, but would have made better sense with how in love they had been.
Other than that this is a great film. It's just that when a movie comes across as so realistic and honest, the one major detail on which the whole story hinges could have been made more believable without taking anything away from the rest of the story just as it is.
Should they do another movie with a messy, but happy ending? Of course they should.
If I had my way they would end the next movie arm in arm, looking at each other smiling, walking down a Parisian street at sunset with the James Taylor version of "How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You)" playing in the background as the shot freezes and the credits roll.
I know, I know, a bit "hokey", but hey... without the romantics of this world it would be a dark and dreary place indeed.
