HOWZAT

She does have one fault, though: like Delpy, she abhors silence. At times, even Jesse seems to be looking at her a little askance, as if wondering when she’ll quieten down for a moment. And if, by the end of the film, Jesse is just as enamoured of Celine as he was nine years ago, I confess I had fallen right out of love. Celine seems to have become the kind of person who would insist on telling you how great she is at sex while you’re doing it. And as much as she says she has thrown herself into the portrayal, as a writer and as an actress, unfortunately, what’s really interesting and endearing and mysterious about Delpy is completely missing from Celine. Beset with health and other problems, Delpy is a fascinating gothic rhapsody of conflicting anxieties, compulsions and dark obsessions. Celine is all surface.

“I’m a very anxious person,” Delpy admits. Perhaps that’s because of her congenital ill health and because, when she was a child, she was taken away from her parents, both actors, for a while because they didn’t have enough money to look after her. “And I’m always doubting things,” she adds. Beyond that, Delpy is dangerously self-absorbed, she knows.

“I couldn’t care less about the world outside,” she admits. “I’m inside my head and (as for) the rest, I don’t even see what’s going on. It’s scary, actually. I turn the most beautiful house into literally something that looks like a battlefield. That’s my house in LA. And my apartment in Paris. My mother comes in and looks at it and she’s like, ‘It’s so sad.’ She leaves right away. It’s filthy.”

Whatever my doubts about Celine, Before Sunset is an intriguing and technically accomplished film-making exercise. Whereas Before Sunrise took place over an entire night, Before Sunset takes place in real time, from the moment when Jesse and Celine run into each other at the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, where Jesse is on the last stop of a European book tour, promoting a novel about the night they met nine years before.

They spend the next 80 minutes wandering the streets of a soft-focus, weirdly depopulated Paris, sitting on park benches, in a cafe, taking a barge down the Seine, talking, discussing, rediscovering each other, finding out if they are still in love.

It is a refreshing and unusual sequel, and, like the documentary series Seven Up, provokes much thought about how we change with the passage of time. One of the most obvious changes is that Celine and Jesse are now much more open sexually.

“In your thirties, you’re much more comfortable with sex,” says Delpy. “First of all, sex is something you’ve done more. You know you can have sex just to have sex; you can have sex with friends; you can have sex with people you love; you can have sex with people you don’t like, but the sex is good. And you can joke about sex much more. As I say in the film, ‘I don’t get wiser, I just get more perverted.’”

Now that’s a fascinating thought.

Before Sunset is released on Friday

Don’t miss the trailer for Before Sunset on July’s The Month CD-Rom

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010