Before Sunset

I saw a special screening of the new Ethan Hawke/Julie Delpy film "Before Sunset" tonight, which opens in theaters next Friday. I saw it in the new "luxury" cinema in downtown D.C., which rocks.

As you may already know, it's the sequel to the 1994 movie "Before Sunrise," in which the two play a young couple who meet by chance on a Eurotrain. Jesse's American and Celine is French, they explore Vienna and over one day and evening, and fall in love.

The years have not been kind to Hawke - his face looks gaunt and wrinkled (the furrows on his brow are so deep you can plant potatoes in them) where once it was smooth and unlined. He also has a scraggly goatee and a body that's almost scrawny. He looks much the worse for wear after his split with Uma.

Delpy has aged more gracefully, though she is also thinner than she once was, and her face has lost some (though not all ) of its youthful fullneess. However, by the middle of the film, she seems to have recovered all of her vibrancy. Remember "Europa Europa" and the so-called "Three Colors Trilogy: Rouge, Blanc and Bleu"? She was devastating in them.

The first movie ends with the pair promising to meet six months later at the same train station where they met just 24 hours before. Like COMPLETE BONEHEADS, they deign to swap contact info, even full names, trusting that they will meet in the flesh soon.

The second movie begins nine years later - he in the famous Shakespeare bookshop in Paris as an author who just wrote a novel about his long-ago encounter with Celine - and Celine herself watching from the back of the bookstore.

I won't say more, but I found it very engaging and not treacly at all. However, my SO is much more sentimental than I and wouldn't have minded if it were more Disney-fied.

Men. I tell ya.