On Before Sunset

Ethan Hawke is morphing into Tom Cruise. It's very strange, even his mannerisms remind me of Tom. Fortunately he's taller, and seems less likely to jump up and down on sofas ranting about post-natal depression, but the resemblance is there. Happily this does mean that he has encountered a stylist in the past decade, who has taught him the benefits of shorter, clean hair and product. The changes wrought in his character do seem oddly similar to those I've seen in friends - when guys go from the floppy longish hair with the centre part and baggy clothes to more stylish attire and an actual hair style. Ethan even wears belts now. Still, no butt.

Julie has been particularly sartorially blessed, but give it another nine years and I'm sure there'd be a what were they thinking quotient rearing its head. Both of them look a lot better at 32 than 23 which is nice, I think it might be possible to draw blood on Ethan's cheekbones, he's certainly a lot thinner these days. To the point that when the film opened I had the thought 'what, he's been on crack for the past decade?' but I got past that.

I can see why not everyone loved the film (Margaret did, David didn't, for the record), being more of the talking heads for quite some time, but it revisit the characters very well - very much one for the fans of the original film, if you hadn't seen the first one you might be hard pressed to care too much about the sequel, and I'm prepared to think that you might have needed to be an adolescent at the time to truly _connect_ with Ethan's pain, to care at all about his current setting. And the double dvd pack certainly helps those of us that couldn't remember anything other than the basic premise of the film.

Ethan and Julie clearly hadn't left the characters behind them, they helped write the screenplay for this one, and I think they dealt pretty well with the possibility that the theme of 'unfulfilled love that has a second chance' presents, of the film turning into monumental, vast swathes of sentimentality that expand like a salinating desert to eventually encompass us all in a sea of pain and leave us vomiting into our fortuitously large popcorn containers. There's a nice meandering theme of 'what if' that they concentrate on, as well as discussing their lives, and the film is much more located at a specific time and so references particular things - I liked that they included Nina Simone (as a conversation topic I mean). Both characters have a slightly dark sense of humour which is cool, but it is hard to believe that people who hadn't seen each other in a decade would be quite so ready to bag each other out, but then I guess that's true love for you.

What is very cool is that the film is set in Paris - and opens in Shakespeare & Co. - The. Bookstore. That. I've. Been. Too. Fictionally, Ethan slept there, so it's possible that a fictional character has slept in the bed that I have actually read in! Just imagine what Baudrillard would say about that. Admittedly, possibly nothing at all as there is a good chance his theories have no bearing on that.