A Favorite Film, Now Available on DVD

Highly recommended, dreamy idealistic romantic film. Real relationships. Europe. Paris. Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, and Richard Linklater directing. Real-time cinema. Beautiful camera, touching music, exquisitely melancholic, tragically beautiful storyline. I love it. And of course it's low circulation and selling for quite a premium.

Richard Linklater's seductive, gently stylized film provides a bookend to his 1995 'Before Sunrise,' in which an American tourist, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), meets a French graduate student, Celine (Julie Delpy), on the train to Vienna. They spend a night walking and talking and flirting.

In the new film, it's nine years later, Jesse has published a best-selling novel based on his one-night romance, and he's in Paris doing promotion when Celine, whom he hasn't seen in the interim, walks into the store where he's signing books. Mr. Linklater portrays their reunion in real time in the 80 minutes they have to spend together before Jesse is to be taken to the airport. They're awkward and vaguely resentful of each other at first, but as they drift through Paris they open to each other and discover the qualities that drew them together the first time.

Mr. Linklater films most of 'Before Sunset' with the shot that has been his signature since he emerged with 'Slacker' in 1991: the camera precedes the characters as they walk, looking back and holding them in a loose two-shot as they talk and react to each other. Only when the action becomes stationary, as when they stop at a cafe or visit Celine's apartment near the end, does Mr. Linklater introduce the alternating, over-the-shoulder close-ups that most directors would use to film dialogue. It's a smart, unobtrusive stylistic choice that suggests Jesse and Celine are truly together only when they're in motion, moving through life rather than trying to seize and stabilize it. There's not much else in American filmmaking to compare to this beautiful miniature; it's as if an Eric Rohmer script had been directed by Max Ophuls. 2004. Warner Home Video. $27.95. R."

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The New York Times > Movies > New DVD's: The Marx Brothers, Fritz Lang and 'Before Sunset'