Nine years ago, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delphy) met on a train travelling through Europe. After a few minutes of stimulating conversation, they reached his stop in Vienna. He had a night to spend in the city before catching a plane back to the United States the next morning, and Jesse convinced Celine to spend it with him. Those events were captured in the charming film Before Sunrise, directed by Richard Linklater. Now, nine years later, the director and his actors have collaborated on an even more charming sequel that reunites the two lovers for an eighty minute real-time conversation through the streets Paris. Though you need to see the original to truly appreciate the sequel, Sunset may trump Sunrise with its quality of acting, intensity of emotion, and beautiful photography.

The first scene, the only one that doesn’t simply feature Jesse and Celine talking, may be the best in the whole film. Jesse is in a Parisian bookstore to promote “This Time,” the novel he’s written about his night in Vienna with Celine. Journalists ask him various details about the book: was their really a girl on a train in Vienna? With enough prodding, Jesse admits that there was (Before Sunrise was based on a similar night Linklater spent with a woman he met in Philadelphia). Did he and the real girl meet six months later, as they planned to at the end of his novel (and at the end of Before Sunrise)? He deflects the question and leaves it to the reader, just as Linklater did by putting the onus on the viewer in the first film. During the question and answer session, Linklater intercuts Jesse’s answers with silent images from Sunrise. Jesse begins to describe his idea for another book, about pop music and synchronicity, about living in both past and present simultaneously. The images of Celine from nine years ago continue, just as Celine walks into the bookstore in the present. It’s a beautiful moment of style illustrating substance.

That one sequence probably has more cuts than most of the rest of the film. After Jesse and Celine depart the bookstore, first for a coffeeshop, then through a park and onto a boat, the camera follows inobtrusively, maintaining a couple of steps distance and cutting as little as possible, while the pair return to their nine-year-old conversation. Old topics are restruck and new ones are broached. Unanswered questions from Sunrise - did they meet six months later? Did they have sex in the first film? - are answered. Both Jesse and Celine have changed in their time apart but their bond of romantic chemistry forged in their mutual love of each other’s half of the conversation has endured.

Sunset works effortlessly, but must have been hell to shoot. The long takes and the gorgeous magic hour light were surely difficult to coordinate with the intricate dialogue so that it could feel as improvisational and spontaneous as it does. Linklater, returning from a successful venture in mainstream Hollywood with The School of Rock, reaffirms, as he did in Sunrise, that nothing is more stimulating that two smart people talking.

Before Sunrise felt as if it existed outside of time; as if for one night both participants got to step outside of themselves and live a different life. It was also far more episodic than Sunset; which, in contrast, is beset with references to time. Not only does this one unfold in the span of the eighty minutes that fill the running time, but Jesse is constantly checking his watch while Celine endlessly reminds him not to miss his plane. The attention to time puts an emphasis on the film’s structure and may also be a comment by Linklater, Hawke, and Delphy (who all collaborated on the screenplay) about how people in their thirties are much more obsessed with time than people in their twenties.