If you were going to be stood up, it would be nice not to be kept vainly waiting around, more than 2,000 miles from home.
Poor old American student Jesse (Hawke) jetted out from Texas to Austria to link up with the subject of his holiday romance - Celine (Delpy)... only to be subjected to a no-show. The hussy.
Nine years later, he's a successful novelist doing a book signing in Paris... when who should walk back into his life but the floozie who left him out of love (and pocket) all those years ago.
Before Sunrise, the 1995 movie which introduced us to Jesse and Celine, was that rare thing - an American romance which shrugged off the rom-com straitjacket and had the courage of its convictions to be dialogue-led.
Now she is a left-wing activist for an environmental pressure group, while Jesse is riding on the success of his novel, which just happens to be based on that night spent with Celine.
He's got a couple of hours before his plane, so the estranged lovers hook up and find out what's been happening in the intervening years.
Celine, who didn't make the date because her grandmother died, is now living with a war photographer while Jesse is married with a small son.
Taking place in real time, the conversation flits lightly and breezily over recollections of that first meeting.
He says she looks thinner, which she takes as an implication she was fat when they first met, while she claims they never had sex. "Do you mean you've forgotten?" is his pained response.
Then things take a darker turn, when we learn that neither are happy in their current relationships and have subconsciously never quite got over that brief encounter.
Witty and urbane (with Delpy contributing large slabs of dialogue), this is a constant delight, with a chemistry between the two leads which is both electric and as comfortable as old slippers.
Better than the original - which was a little stilted and awkward - this sees Hawke and Delpy fashioning a poignant romance out of mere words. Something you don't often get at the cinema.
Tim Evans
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