If there exists one piece of solid proof that aging gracefully is still a possibility in an era of sequels, prequels, and remakes, it’s Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset. While its 1995 predecessor, Before Sunrise, may have exquisitely captured that particular twentysomething moment before we all grow too jaded to believe in the romantic ideal of fate, Before Sunset strips raw the realization that longing, not love, is what truly propels us through life and occasionally weighs us down, forcing us to drown in complacency. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy), though in no way the composites of Gen-X disorientation and dissolution they once were, do exist as universal portraits of dissatisfied adulthood. Successful as they might be, careful as they are in constructing and affirming their own façades of emotional fulfillment, Jesse and Céline’s “relationship” is in no way an escape from their banal realities. It too is a construction, and while it may be an alluring one, which escapes the confines of the day to day, both they as participants and we as viewers are given no reassurances that it will last the span of a lifetime, let alone the span of the film itself. And still, despite—or perhaps as a direct result of—the film’s continual struggle against romantic affectation, Before Sunset does revel in the amorous realities of its locale (Paris, however casually filmed, has been and will likely always be the very definition of “picturesque”) and scenario (which doesn’t need to stoop to crippling catastrophe to exude the same poignancy as An Affair to Remember). Hell, the entire film takes place at dusk, Mother Nature’s official version of Spanish fly.

While perhaps not handled with the same quiet aplomb as Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, Linklater’s meandering conversational progression in light of the veritable landmine that is romantic comedy authorship is a thing to marvel at, jumping from the pair’s initial wide-eyed reunion to timely jibes at the tenuous “freedom friendship” between America and France to their inevitable backseat taxicab confessional, orchestrated with equal parts constraint and chaos as the city of lights careens past the windows. The triumph of the original was its ability to remain deliciously ambiguous, hesitantly hopeful and wary all at once. As we catch up with Jesse and Céline, it becomes quickly apparent that the years have set up even more roadblocks that would seem to make love an impossibility (marriage, a child, and a burgeoning career as an unabashedly autobiographical novelist for Jesse: a turn towards political activism and a string of almost-fiancées for Céline).

These layers of complexity, none easily resolved, inevitably lead to the discovery that it was not their evening in Vienna they’ve been clinging to, nor was it their “connection” as individuals thrown together by chance. Rather, the film is an ode to the human memory’s ability to haunt us to the point of quiet madness. The details of that evening nine years prior, both their recollection in conjunction with our own, has grown fuzzy despite its clarity in the mind of the participants—it has been embellished, rose-tinted, held up as a standard of human interaction that cannot be replicated by either party outside of these particular circumstances. The film itself is formally constructed to haunt, touches never quite reaching their intended target for fear of realization that the other is nothing more than spectral memory, its final frames prematurely fading into obscurity, the voice of deceased chanteuse Nina Simone still wafting off the screen. Before Sunset lingers, eschewing closure, moving onward unseen, unraveling the neat third-act bow we’ve all come to not only expect, but demand.

There will undoubtedly be those narrow-minded few that bemoan this lack of resolution, despite the fact that this is addressed smartly by Linklater early on. In a seemingly innocuous debate over shoe shopping, Jesse suggests that to want is healthy, yet to feel entitled is not. Shoes, love, filmic expectations, they’re all one in the same in Linklater’s world. And the encapsulated world of Before Sunset, boxed in as it may be by finite temporal and spatial borders, is equally vast and eclectic in its implications regarding life, love, and the potentially disastrous and always enthralling amalgamation of the two.