Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy float down the Seine in 'Before Sunset.' Before Sunset Starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Directed by Richard Linklater. Written by Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy. Rated PG-13. Now playing in Dallas, opens July 30 in Fort Worth.

So why isn't Richard Linklater regularly discussed as one of the world's great filmmakers? Almost everything he has touched has turned to gold, from the daring experimental cinema of Waking Life to the mainstream entertainment of The School of Rock. After the success of his early films, he could have reworked the vibe of disaffected, intelligent youth until it turned to well-worn shtick. Instead, he has branched out relentlessly -- you'd be hard-pressed to identify the director of the hard-edged theatrical adaptations SubUrbia and Tape as the same guy who did Slacker and Dazed and Confused. If there's one thing all his films have in common, it's their small scale; so far he has shown no aptitude for what Sir Walter Scott called the Big Bow Wow strain. This lack of pretension isn't a big draw for the media hypesters, and the man himself doesn't play the press like Quentin Tarantino, Michael Moore, Spike Lee, etc. He also stays away from Hollywood's A-list, though he's proven a wizard at picking from the place's lesser lights. His movies are unabashedly literate and intellectual, and with the exception of Waking Life, they're not particularly eye-catching. Critics overseas appreciate his movies, but the vast non-English-speaking audiences in the global marketplace haven't caught onto him. All these are possible reasons why, despite having made his share of commercial hits and more than his share of great movies, his following remains small and cultish. The idea of a "Richard Linklater film" just doesn't have much shape in the public imagination or much selling power.

I mean, even when I saw Before Sunset on the docket as one of this summer's films, I took no more than a professional interest in it. Maybe that's because the movie reunites the two main characters from his 1995 film Before Sunrise, in which a chance meeting on a summer's day in Vienna led to hours of chatter and an almost mystical connection of souls. The original was so splendid, while reunions like these (in the movies and real life) are so often disappointing. The follow-up couldn't possibly recapture the old magic, could it? Oh yes, it could.

The movie picks up nine years later with Jesse (Ethan Hawke) on a book tour of Europe to promote a novel that he wrote describing his encounter with Celine (Julie Delpy). As he regales the local press in a Paris bookstore, she shows up. He has about an hour before he has to leave for the airport, so they spend that time walking around the city, catching up on their lives and settling the question of whether they ever made it back to Vienna six months after their original meeting as they promised.

Undoubtedly the most remarkable thing about this movie is how these two actors have effortlessly renewed the same matchless rapport that they had in the earlier film. Really, it's like they haven't spent a minute of the intervening years away from each other. (Technically, they were reunited before as the same characters for a three-minute vignette in Waking Life. Celine makes a reference to an old lady's dream that you won't get unless you've seen that movie.) Hawke, looking less pretty and more chiseled than he did in 1995, once again projects the wry charm that he notably lacks in all his other films except Before Sunrise. Delpy, meanwhile, looks more fully formed now than she did then. (With her brains, talent, playfulness, and ripe sexuality, how has she not become a huge international star?) Her little breakdown near the end of the film is touching, as Celine contemplates Jesse's leaving and realizes that her emotional life is never as fulfilling as when she's with him.

The conversations between them have a beautifully engaging rhythm -- Celine waxes rhapsodic about love and fundamental questions of human existence, and then Jesse punctuates her musings with a well-placed wisecrack. There's also a gently sad pattern in which the two make ironic jokes about that night to keep their feelings from overwhelming them. It turns out that neither of them has had anything like a satisfying love life since their date. Jesse describes living with his wife and son in a devastating throwaway line, "I feel like I'm running a nursery with someone I used to date." The company of these two intelligent, witty chatterboxes who have such a deep, instinctive understanding of each other is intoxicating, right down to the film's teasingly ambiguous ending. Before Sunset and its predecessor are worthy members of the pantheon of great conversation films, alongside Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre, Barry Levinson's Diner, Mike Leigh's Career Girls, Whit Stillman's Metropolitan and The Last Days of Disco, and Kevin Smith's Clerks. These are all indispensable viewing for those who thrill on the purely verbal component of cinema, the sheer power of dialogue to reveal character and create a movie's landscape, and the ways that the very substance of our lives -- from our random thoughts to our most transcendent moments -- can be put into words.

You can reach Kristian Lin at kristian.lin@fwweekly.com.

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