Before Sunset (2004)

Before Sunset is a film about two people walking and talking, and it commits to that premise with a discipline that leaves the classifier almost nothing to do. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy occupy nearly every frame, both of them white, both of them European, both of them fluent in the kind of self-aware banter that sounds like intelligence and functions as avoidance. The supporting cast exists to hand over a book or drive a car. There is no room in this structure for the demographic accounting that occupies so much of the contemporary ledger, and the film never reaches for it.

Céline works for an environmental organization. This fact arrives in conversation the way a job arrives in conversation, as biography, and the film moves on to the next subject without asking us to save the planet. Politics surfaces briefly, the way it does between two people with an hour to kill, then dissolves into a discussion of memory and regret. Nobody is lectured. Nobody is sorted into a category. The film's ethical engine is nostalgia, which is not a social program.

What remains is craft. The screenplay, nominated for an Academy Award, was assembled by three people over email and fax, and it has the loose, digressive confidence of something written by people who stopped worrying about structure. It is a sequel, and it earns the nine years it spent waiting. A waltz is played. A flight is missed. The credits roll on a decision nobody has made out loud. We file it under romance and note, with some professional disappointment, that there is nothing else to note.