Richard Linklater's sequel to Before Sunrise, after a nine-year hiatus: not nearly as long as the twenty years between Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman and its sequel, just barely longer than the delay between Jacques Demy's Lola and his Model Shop. It seems appropriate to reference French forerunners (although The Model Shop is in Los Angeles and in English), inasmuch as Linklater elects to reunite his young lovers in Paris, more specifically at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, where the man (a hollower-cheeked Ethan Hawke) is reading from, fielding questions about, and signing his John Hancock to, a semi-autobiographical novel that recounts the events of Before Sunrise. The woman (a hollower-eyed Julie Delpy) turns up in the audience on her own initiative to resume their conversation. The premise allows Linklater to replay clips, during the Q-and-A session, of their one-night stand in Vienna in the summer of '95 -- a helpful refresher for the viewer who wasn't moved to add that title to his video collection. The lovers, should you need reminding, did not swap numbers and addresses at their parting; and their proposed six-month reunion, we now find out, never came about. So they hasten to catch up. They walk in the street, sit in a cafe ("I love this cafe. I wish they had places like this in the U.S."), walk in the park, sit in the park, take a boat ride on the Seine, take a cab to, or toward, the airport, stop by her apartment on the way: the camera keeps quiet and keeps rolling. The rhythm of conversation, albeit an abnormally gushing and bubbling one, dictates the rhythm of the film: it would almost be Rohmer-esque (for another French reference) if it had more of a moral dilemma, more of a narrative situation, to accompany the yackety-yak. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd