Before Sunset

WHEN BEFORE SUNRISE was released in 1995, critics hailed the movie as the most unconventional of love stories–an evening unwinding through the eyes of two strangers experiencing a foreign city and each other for the first time. For audiences, the film recalled the intoxicating promise of youth, in which two people could get off a train unexpectedly to spend an evening talking about everything under the stars.

Now, original stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reunite with director Richard Linklater in the endearing romantic-drama Before Sunset, the highly awaited sequel to Before Sunrise.

Before Sunset tells the romantic story of two questing hearts and minds whose powerful bond defies time and place. Nine years ago, two strangers Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy) met by chance, spent a night together in Vienna, and parted before sunrise. Now, they’re about to cross paths again in Paris, where they will get the chance we all wish we had–to find out what might have been. The only problem is they have just a few hours to figure out if they belong together.

Before Sunrise’s documentary-like feel resonated through the relationship of Jesse and Celine, which held remarkably true to the rhythms and subtleties of actual romantic encounters. "Our characters are like the archetypal male/female," comments Hawke. "We’re trying to talk about the nature of relationships more than we are specifics. We never see them in the context of their day-to-day life. We’re just catching them in these little glimpses."

"We wanted to try to make a movie about what it was like to really connect with somebody," Hawke continues. "And that’s been the mission statement of both these films, just to create drama out of the ordinary nature of life."

For Delpy, having no resolution to the two characters’ promise to meet again felt like something unfinished in her own life. "It felt like something was missing in our lives, in a weird way, some place missing inside of us," she says. "It was a wonderful thing to be able now to do it."

For all of the players, the characters of Jesse and Celine continued to live in their minds, and each time they’d see one another, they’d discuss where to take them. Though a myriad of possibilities presented themselves over the years, the idea emerged of doing a film in real time–an hour and a half in the lives of Jesse and Celine. "That’s when we knew we’d found the right idea for it," comments Hawke. "We wanted to take the whole idea of a slice-of-life to a new, heightened degree."

"Before Sunrise follows these two young people who meet on a train and just spend one night together," explains Hawke. "But it’s so magical and powerful that at the end, they decide they’d rather not write and keep in touch. They’re worried that it’ll just become ordinary if they do that. Instead, they decide they’re just going to meet again in six months to the day. And that’s how the first film ends. The second film starts nine years later and my character has written a book about that one night. And she shows up at his book reading."

"They both have their own lives," adds Delpy. "They’ve grown along very different paths, and now they’re more complex, in a way. In Before Sunrise, they were living in this fantasy of being young and seeing the future. But now, it’s all about living in the moment."

Once the reading is over, Jesse has only limited time before he’s expected to check in at the airport for his flight back to New York. Celine, who lives in Paris, agrees to spend that time having coffee with him at a café she knows. "He has written a novel; he’s on his last book tour and he’s leaving that night," comments Linklater, "so the time frame is compressed even more. This movie takes place more or less in real time. You get this eighty-five minute encounter between them before he gets a ride to the airport."

With time running short, the two engage in a complex dialogue about life, love, how they’ve changed, the world, and anything else that occurs to them. "To me, it’s just an examination of how your life proceeds," says Linklater. "All we can do is live forward and you just do the best with everything around you. It’s very much the way the first film was–just a moment in time. Before Sunrise was roughly 14 or 15 hours in these two people’s lives at a random intersection in a town neither of them lived in. In that film, to me, they were sort of like ghosts in this city that they didn’t really belong to, almost in their own world, this ethereal world of their own imagination. This movie is very much about and takes place in the real world. It’s Paris. She lives in Paris. It’s her world, and it’s very realistic."

While there’s no traditional plot beyond two people reconnecting, Hawke points out that the story is more in the subtle inner workings that make us human. "The character is the story," he says. "What happens inside our brains and minds, why we behave the way we do, what makes us tick, what do we think is important–the inner life of the characters is the story of the movie."

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Before Sunset opens in theaters on October 27.