Love at the movies rarely resembles love in real life; onscreen, love stories often gain a grandeur and single-mindedness that don't allow the obstructions of life to impede it for very long...rarely more than two hours. Most movie loves end happily, a few end badly, but rarely do they live in the murky middle ground where life often ends up. The reality, of course, is that love is just a bad Story Idea: love confuses, love meanders, and love takes a while to sort itself out. The texture of love, the truth of it, rarely finds an elegant dramatic arc. Love is a story, all right, but unless you twist it profusely, it is rarely a fairy tale or a tragedy. Reality is more complex, and both God and the Devil are in the details.

It is all the more astonishing, then, that Richard Linklater has made not one but two marvelously complex stories of love...about the same characters, no less. In 1995, Linklater's Before Sunrise introduced us to the American Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and the French grad student Celine (Julie Delpy), who meet aboard a European train and spend a night walking around Vienna before going their separate ways. Charming in its simplicity, uncompromising in its intellect and its hopefulness, Before Sunrise slowly revealed itself to be the best film about young love in a generation, and the most potent cinematic romance of the 90's.

Linklater's remarkable new sequel to Before Sunrise, cheekily titled BEFORE SUNSET, revisits Jesse and Celine almost a decade later, in almost the same setup: now a successful novelist, Jesse is in Paris on a European book tour when Celine suddenly shows up. She's read Jesse's most recent novel, which details a night very similar to the one they spent together in Vienna nine years ago. Although the two fall into the same easy rhythms and chemistry they exhibited as twentysomethings, much has changed. The struggles of youth are different from the struggles of impending middle age, and Jesse and Celine are encumbered by years of bad relationships...and the feeling that they somehow missed their chance that fateful day in Vienna. Is it too late to go back? Can one ever really go back? BEFORE SUNSET answers these questions and many more; if the first film was about the giddy rush of connecting with another person for the first time, an older and wiser Linklater has made a sequel about the struggle to stay open and active and passionate and alive. Even as we find ourselves inevitably worn down by life, BEFORE SUNSET asks whether we are too damaged to risk ourselves the way we once did...and can we find a way to approach the world anew.

There's a certain thirtysomething indulgence to these questions, of course, and Linklater, Hawke and Delpy (who collaborated on the screenplay) seem quite aware of drifting into self-seriousness. Hawke's Jesse often interrupts a sophisticated train of thought with sexual innuendo; Celine jumps subjects when things become too heavy. These are the defense mechanisms of a generation bred from irony and nurtured into detachment; Generation X has come of age even as their parents, the Baby Boomers, desperately keep clinging to their control of the world at large. Such generational malaise presents problems for those searching to reconnect; Jesse and Celine still obsess over large metaphysical issues -- how to liberate oneself from the sense of entitlement, how to escape the trap of living up to a predetermined potentiality -- but these larger ideologies now sit alongside the repercussions of a life lived. Jesse has married and had a child. Celine has traveled the world and yet still ends up in dead-end relationships. Both have been tormented by the one who got away, but neither is especially ready or willing to open up to that again.

Shot in long single takes as the couple wanders the streets and riverbanks of Paris, BEFORE SUNSET has an immediacy that makes other movies feel comatose. Linklater opens his camera to encompass an entire experience, using the bustle and sway of Paris to ground his story. Sometimes, Linklater allows the sunlight to lurch dizzingly into the scene, temporarily blinding both viewer and subject, threatening to overpower all of us in a heady rush of emotion and light. Linklater's openness to his surroundings, however, does not detract from his vigilant focus on the characters. We never once leave our subjects, watching them with the luxury of time and stillness movies rarely afford -- Hawke's eyes, now older and sadder, have a wounded quality that gain resonance when he stares just a moment too long at Delpy. For her part, the astonishingly talented French actress now has the tiniest of creases defining her beauty, giving her smiles the slightest trace of doubt. Every hand gesture, every timid glance, is delivered with magnificent dexterity by these two remarkable actors. Through what is said and, more importantly, what is not, BEFORE SUNSET reveals itself as the mini-masterpiece it is. It is the story of two people falling in love all over again, but with the age, the fear, and the emotional damage to mistrust it this time.

Do they end up back together? As Jesse says early on in the film, people want to believe in love, so far be it from me to ruin the ending for you. You really must see it...it is without a doubt one of the achievements of the year. Rarely does a film so gracefully and delicately recognize that life is a series of moments, a process still in process, and that a life in totality cannot be measured through sums and subtractions. On any given day, if we are open to it, the love of our life might walk through the door...or we might simply realize that they've been standing there all along. What is possible, what is available to us, is limitless; only our own barriers keep us from extraordinary living. Our potential each morning determines what we can achieve BEFORE SUNSET. Bravo to a film that reminds us not only of who Jesse and Celine are, but of who we are. Bravo indeed.

-- Gabriel Shanks

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