The FiFi Report 059

Before Sunset with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy
This is the sequel to ‘Before Sunrise’ and I just had to see this movie before it goes to video. After all, it is a romance of the highest order and rottentomatoes.com gives it a 94% approval rating. It is set 9 years after Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) have a romantic 14 hour fling in Vienna (and vow to meet again in six months time). Now they are in Paris and meet up when Jesse is “on the last stop of his book tour, and finds Celine watching from the back of the room. She lives in Paris now, he in New York. He’s flying out that evening but they decide to hang out together and catch up” First point: if you are a guy, you can skip this. There is no violence, no sex and lots of talking. In fact this movie is a talkfest talkathon. The script by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke is extraordinarily well written, but all they do is talk and talk and talk. In the end you just want to tell Julie Delpy to shut up. ( and that’s coming from someone who loves a chatnchew). She speaks English with a French accent but her accent, mannerisms and slang are all seriously American, so she comes across as completely neurotic and really pretentious. The New York Times says “ though it is sometimes maddening, the movie’s prodigious verbiage is also enthralling, precisely because of its casual disregard for the usual imperatives of screenwriting. In any case, they have now flirted and argued their way through two movies completely oblivious to what anyone else might think of them, and it is their indifference to the audience that makes them so fascinating” Oh yes, it is fascinating, prodigious verbiage or not! Shot in real time, and it’s just fabulous to watch them wander (and chat for hours) around Paris on a summer’s afternoon. They end up in her apartment (which is incredibly daggy with a purple bedspread: urrghh!) but do they end up together? You’ll have to get the video to find out out…..