The greatest love story in recent cinema arrives on demand on Prime Video: Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy

On an ordinary afternoon in Paris, an American writer on a publicity tour meets the woman with whom he had a brief travel romance, years before, and agrees to accompany her for a few hours around the city, even though he knows he needs to catch a plane until nightfall. In “Before Sunset”, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and director Richard Linklater return to those characters and make the reunion the central conflict: deciding what to do with an old feeling in the face of remade lives and assumed responsibilities.

At the bookstore where Jesse signs books, the choice to extend the conversation beyond formal questions already changes the course of the day. He approaches Celine with curiosity and a barely concealed hope that the shared memory does not just belong to the past. She agrees to walk with him not only out of courtesy, but because she also needs to see what place that memory occupies in the woman she has become. The limit is concrete: a few hours, a flight booked, appointments waiting on another continent.

The walk becomes the main form of the narrative and the route reflects the advancement of intimacy. Each change of route arises from the decision to prolong the meeting. They could sit in a cafe and close the matter with formal comments; They prefer to follow the streets, side by side. The city offers seductive paths, but it also imposes concrete obstacles: traffic, clocks, shops that remind us of everyday life waiting. With each detour, the distance from the airport increases and the distance between the two decreases.

The verbal confrontation begins with politeness. Jesse talks about the book he wrote and chooses to present it as fiction, although he knows he is exposing the afternoon in Vienna to any reader. Celine responds with defensive humor, determined not to appear sentimental. Both try to control the version of history that will be accepted there, in the present, and it is from this effort that tension arises. No one wants to be the first to admit that that interrupted afternoon still weighs heavily on important decisions made later.

As the journey progresses, courteous concessions give way to direct questions. He decides to tell her how much he missed her, how he looked for signs in places where they could have met again; she hesitates, changes the subject, comes back, until she admits similar frustrations. With each new piece of information, the two need to recalculate what they considered to be established fact. When they talk about the night they should have met again, an almost banal obstacle, linked to family commitments and practical disagreements, appears as the piece that disrupted years of silent expectation.

The almost real time in which everything unfolds works as another force on the scene. By concentrating the story in a few hours, the film turns the clock into constant pressure, even when no one mentions the time. Jesse knows how long he has until the airport and, with each decision to go with Celine, he reduces his margin of safety. She notices this and sometimes insists that he go, as if to measure the extent to which he risks the tidy life he describes.

At a certain point, the rhythm of the phrases and steps accelerates. They dodge tourists. They cross streets hurriedly. They speak almost without pause. Small incidents along the way force the couple to get physically closer and adjust their pace. Each movement requires deciding whether to maintain the lightness of the reunion or assume that there is something more at stake. Every minimal gesture changes the temperature of the conversation and makes it difficult to believe that everything can end in a polite farewell.

When the route changes from public space to more closed environments, the discussion also narrows. Inside the car, without the distraction of the landscape, Jesse must deal with more incisive questions about his family life. He decides to answer with half the truth, convinced that he protects absent people, but this choice creates a new obstacle between him and Celine, who notices the gaps and insists on filling them. Physical proximity reinforces the feeling of lack of air and concrete risk.

The point of greatest risk appears when, towards the end of the journey, the two stop talking only about the past and face what they can or cannot still do for each other. It is no longer a question of reconstructing what went wrong nine years earlier, but of deciding whether anything will be changed that day. Jesse, late for any smooth return to routine, evaluates the cost of a gesture of rupture, while Celine decides whether to encourage or curb this impulse.

In Celine’s apartment, now far from the street and the gaze of strangers, the temporal siege reaches maximum intensity. There are no more traffic noises or tourists to distract you. What remains is her voice, the guitar, the silence between sentences that begin as a joke and end as a confession. There, decisions take on simple materiality: sitting down, getting up, making coffee, taking off your shoes. Each choice pushes the limit of what would be acceptable that late afternoon, while the plane remains a distant but real possibility.

The film ends this journey without offering clear verbal answers, preferring an image that captures the feeling of suspension. Jesse is where he shouldn’t be at that time, Celine agrees to prolong the scene with a slight gesture, and the outside world remains outside the window. What matters is not knowing for sure what decision will come next, but understanding how some conversations change the internal map of those who lived them, even if the physical journey only lasted a few streets.