Do not read this review before reading my review of its predecessor film “Before Sunset.” Nine years ago two young people spent, we are told, an amazing night in Vienna togehter. To play with fortune they did not exchange phone numbers but promised each other to meet on a particular day six months later in Vienna. He goes to Vienna, but she does not show up. Later he feels compelled to write a book about this amazing evening they enjoyed in Vienna. Now he is on a tour promoting the book and the last stop in Europe is a reading in a small bookshop in Paris. At the end of his reading she is suddenly standing in the back of the audience.  He only has a little bit of time before his limo is scheduled to take him to the airport. She agrees to his proposal to go to a cafe and catch up…  Before Sunrise is almost perfect.

Ethan Hawke is beautifully able to communicate the emotions that he character has felt during the previous nine years. Julie Delpy, however, proves too weak an actress to fill the role of the female counterpart. Her lack of acting skills destroys what otherwise would have been a spotless piece of art. To be sure, the roles given to Hawke and her very difficult. The entire film is a 90 minute uninterrupted conversation before his taxi is suppoed to take him to his flight to New York.  I tried to put my finger on what was wrong with her performance. First I noticed that she could not give her soliloquies any pauses to give herself and the viewer time to take in the meaning of her words that were sprouting our of her mouth. Then I realized that her mistake may have been that she did not fully remove her own personality from the role. She let Julie Delpy step into the foreground rather than the character she was supposed to play. It is also possible that she simply did not understand the emotions of her character and therefore could not enact them.  This movie made the opposite mistake of Under the Tuscony Sun, which had a bad story but beautiful cinematography of the Italian landscape. The film has a beautiful story that could have been even more gripping with better shots of Paris.  I saw the film on an airplane and did not see another film on the program because I wanted to let Before Sunset linger on in me.