Year-end polls and lists get me down. What could be—and occasionally is—an opportunity for debate, argument, and advocacy, reverts with the sudden swiftness of backlash to one critic pooh-poohing another critic’s preferences until all noteworthy films seem half-full concoctions, lambaste-deserving versions of their previous poll-topping selves. It’s hard to tell if we’re fighting for the sake of the films or for our own stake in the arbitration of taste. Maybe we critics are overcompensating for the amnesiatic tendencies of our culture by fighting to install behind glass films that have only just taken flight, threatening to amber the energy of even the most vociferously celebrated specimen.

In her 1966 essay “Theatre and Film,” Susan Sontag (whose passing coincided with the concluding calendar year and whose work certainly merits retrospective advocacy) wrote that, “Cinema is a time machine... The historical particularity of the reality registered on celluloid is so vivid that practically all films older than four or five years are saturated with pathos.” Films are always, unavoidably, past—even a freshly edited film festival entry or on-set dailies. So we’re not crazy for “looking back” at films we’ve only just seen—the art form just about requires it; but we should conserve a few breaths for a later date when our arguments are bound to be richer.

I don’t know if a film can better exemplify Sontag’s point than Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise (1995), which I had seen at the time of its release as something of a blowhardy irritant, too eager to capture a contemporary reality, and which I now feel more kindly towards, freed as it is from the demands (self-inflicted though they were) of being true to the moment. I also don’t know of a film that better complicates my abovementioned wariness of backlash polemics than its sequel, last year’s Before Sunset, which for all of its admirable qualities didn’t make the same impression on me as it did my Reverse Shot colleagues (as well as the contributors to the Village Voice’s Annual Critics Poll) who considered it the best picture of the year. Needless to say, in four or five years there could be that saturation of pathos for me, but for now I can only describe what’s currently there, a film I don’t quite recognize in the fine and passionate appraisals I’ve read.

Before Sunset revisits the young romantics Jesse and Cèline in Paris rather than Vienna, nine years after their departure in Sunrise, matching the time elapsed between the films. Same actors, different city, more talk. But rather than follow the characters over a 24- hour period, the sequel furthers its time-synch by keeping them together for the length of the film itself. Time has passed, time is passing. There’s power in this, feeling the seconds vanish as Jesse and Cèline are soon to vanish from us and from each other, seeing the character of age form on Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s faces, watching the light change from Bruckheimer-burnt-orange to the mysteries of grey. Yet for all the years between their—and our—last meeting, Jesse and Cèline are stunningly similar to their younger selves. They remain very hard to take, which presented me with a problem, being as they’re the whole picture. Shots and cuts are understated and few, action is minimal and necessarily casual, and secondary characters are like parents in Peanuts cartoons. Conversation carries the picture, and I kept wanting to wander off. I respect the method, the focus on character rather than shots or scenery, but I could have used a nice tangent through the Tuileries or even Sunrise’s heavy-handed chat with a poetic hobo, just for a break. I don’t mean to overstate my case—I really didn’t wander off, and I’m pretty sure I listened to every word. I also don’t need to like the characters in a film; in fact I appreciate that Linklater doesn’t require me to. The central problem is that Jesse and Cèline’s dialogue sounds like dialogue, not conversation. It comes off as memorized and recited. Set speeches start, get interrupted and overlapped, and eventually end at a tidy pace. They talk “politics” and “philosophy” and “life” with trademark self-satisfaction. Oh, but that’s just Jesse and Cèline, and that’s just the inorganic awkwardness of sexually tense talks between old loves. Okay. I’m not so sure, but okay. Just don’t ask me to see romance in their reunion stroll—what passed for chemistry in the post-collegiate past is simply embarrassing between adults.

But then they get in the taxi, and people finally emerge. Words drop unexpectedly, tempers flare and retreat, and the rhythm’s all haywire. Time’s running out and forcing out moment after moment of truth. A wasted hour of preening falsehoods later, Jesse and Cèline come clean. It’s beautiful and astonishing. Despite their memories of that idyllic day in Vienna, the pull between them is not true love but true disappointment with what brought them to this point. How they haven’t come to terms with heartbreak in the intervening years is anyone’s guess, but it’s thrilling to see the false air of romance sucked out the windows and replaced, fleetingly, with the chemistry of a real moment. A “holy moment” in Linklater-land.

The buzz of sudden emotional intimacy carries them out of the car, Jesse finding more seconds to squeeze out of the dwindling minutes until his flight home. The buzz carries them up the stairs to the door of Cèline’s flat with a perfectly placed loop-de-loop long take, a dance that’s short, elegant, and earned. I respect Linklater all the more. Sixty minutes of fake behavior, ten minutes of real, and I’m dancing up the stairs with them. That Linklater’s insistence on not judging characters, of refusing to moralize or make them embody anything but themselves, however inane and narcissistic they may be, reaches an apotheosis here. Patience and empathy at all costs pays off. I’m reminded of the bug marching up the side of the window towards the end of Alexander Sokurov’s Mother and Son, of sudden motion triggering emotion, of life after seeing only stillness and death. Jesse and Cèline are finally brought to life, reanimated after all these years.

Which brings us to that last scene. That flat. That song and dance. That celebrated ellipsis. For me, by passing that threshold Jesse and Cèline undo what they stumbled upon back in the car. They’ve misread their intimacy as proof of the romantic lie. They’ve overvalued their two days together just when they’d made strides towards determining its actual weight on the long scales of their lives. I’m disgusted. I’m judging where Linklater doesn’t seem willing to. Or is he? In our last sight of Jesse, before the fade obscures the ensuing actions (and saves them all from exploring the moral repercussions of decisions to do or not to do), he’s fiddling with his wedding ring. Oh, right, he’s married! He mentioned something about that, didn’t he? For all that Sunset accomplishes with time, I realize it made a greater impression on me in negative, and I fixate on the lost intervening spaces, the everything we don’t see. Having only these two days to spend with these people gives us a wildly skewed view of lives. For both characters, there are people—whole families and packs of friends—much more central to their lives than each other, but we’ll never know them. We’ll never root for them to grow up or get it on, we’ll never really consider what damage is being done to them in the name of fantasy, in the name of romance.

To deliver them into that fantasy, they pass back through that post-collegiate portal, the spinning tire interior of Cèline’s boho flat, CD cases proudly displayed along with wispy touches of Stevie Nicks-feminine fabrics, the now requisite Nina Simone for those thin white girl blues and, of course, the telltale futon. These are adults, people who should know the difference between a sweet fling of youth and love, of a nice story revisited and a strained one resumed, of quick licks from memory’s lollypop of one-that-got-away longing and life-altering indulgence in nostalgia. Linklater lets me feel these things about his characters, lets me negate the very purpose of spending so much time with such people, and for that allowance he’s given me a singular cinematic experience for 2004. Just don’t expect me to bandy about words like “bittersweet” or “wistful.” That last scene summoned from me a condemnation I’m reluctant to repeat, but nevertheless one that persists: I felt it pathetic that Jesse and Cèline wouldn’t know when to walk away.

For me the ellipses comes too late to redeem them. I’m probably harder on them for being contemporaries (like me, Jesse and Cèline are in their early thirties), for not being at least as mature and as self-possessed as every single person I know. Perhaps, like I did its predecessor, I’ll rewatch Sunset several years on and be more patient with Cèline and Jesse, maybe I’ll feel pathos for the embarrassments of their desperation—time and age allowing for the sympathy of reflection. And maybe Linklater will revisit them again in their forties, and maybe they’ll finally grow up and take me for a longer, sweeter ride in the conversation car, and we’ll all end up dancing up the stairs to say goodnight before returning to the lives that brought us there.

More on Before Sunset:
Richard Linklater interview
Scott's Before Sunset
Rowin's Before Sunset
Plouffe's Before Sunset
Reichert's Before Sunset