Rent It! - Before Sunset

I mentioned the movie Before Sunset as the benchmark for sequels revisiting characters a decade later. Like Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater created two characters that he just had to revisit, and it's become one of my favorite films. The movie is the sequel to Before Sunrise released in 1995, in which two early-twentysomethings, Jessie, an American, played by Ethan Hawke, and Celine, a Frenchwoman, played by Julie Delpy, hop off a train together in Vienna and star in a how-to-have-a-daylong-Gen X affair. They promise to meet each other six months later, but refuse to exchange addresses, phone numbers, or even last names, in so they could just pick up where they left off and not get sucked into the mundanity that is a "relationship". See? Told ya it was totally Gen X.
The sequel opens nine years later, in a Paris bookstore, where Jessie is on the last stage of a book tour promoting his novel about that night in Vienna. Celine approaches him in the bookstore and we begin 80 mins of (almost) real time film. The movie is all conversation, but it's "conversation" in the same way that "The Blues Brothers" ended with a "car chase." Their talk goes from, curious, to flirtatious, to lamenting, to frustration all the while staying charming to one another, the way you're charming to someone who immediately gets you.

Their night together, at first almost dismissed, looms in the background of their speech and it starts to snowball and grow until it comes back to the forefront. It creates such a wonderful moment for the fans of the first movie, because you are immersed on what a landmark event that night in Vienna was to both of their lives, and now we get to witness the aftermath. It's a sequel that aggrandizes the original while in itself creates a work that is the rarest of the rare in movies: a sequel that demands another sequel. (And I don't mean like a trilogy assheads!)

There was a line I heard the other day and I'm going to butcher it, but it went something like this: The love you almost have, is the love that lasts forever. Well, this movie is about having another chance with that love you almost had. Here's the trailer:


P.S Don't think that I've gone soft just because I like movies like this. I'll bring it back raw next time, yo. 'Cause that's how I roll, suckas!

Tags: Rent It, Movies