Before Sunrise is one of my all-time favorite movies. I even worked the film into a short story I published (“Diva Moves” from the Brown Sugar 3 erotica collection) just to maybe turn more people onto it. It’s very European- talky, in fact it’s nothing but talking: an American guy (Ethan Hawke) and a French girl (Julie Delpy) meet on a train going across Europe, and decide to get off in Vienna to discover the city and each other. But when it came out in 1995, the movie’s twentysomething dialogue spoke directly to me; I always played it for new women in my life and learned a lot about them through what their thoughts were about the film.

In Before Sunset, the sequel nine years later, the slacker guy has become a writer (surprise) and does a book reading in Paris at Shakespeare & Co., where he meets up with the girl again. They walk through the city having thirtysomething conversation, stopping at some point at Le Pure Café in the 11th arrondissement for a while. My favorite line is Ethan Hawke’s, describing his stagnant marriage and family life back in the US: “I feel like I’m running a small nursery with someone I used to date.” Director Richard Linklater collaborated on both the original and its sequel. I enjoyed the original better, but I totally look forward to the three of them hopefully doing it again in their 40s. (After Sunrise?)

I’ll write a real essay on the movies one day, the first one being close to my heart and all. But today I rolled by Le Pure Café for the first time for a drink after meeting my wife at work for lunch, and took the picture above. The Before Sunset scene below is a taste of the film at the moment when Hawke and Delpy stroll into the café. Last year I met Julie Delpy completely on the other side of town, at the Hôtel Pont Royal, over drinks for a Mean magazine piece. Read it here.

One day, somebody will post up on YouTube this scene in my mind’s eye: Agent 99 from Get Smart singing “La Vie en Rose” in a smoky café during some sting operation with her partner Maxwell Smart. (It’s not there; of course I checked.) That was my first exposure to that Édith Piaf classic as a kid, at home sick from school. I remember a combination of the song, a melancholic copy of the Defenders comic book (issue 101), and my fever gave me a lump in my throat.

And so.

Tomorrow, I’m meeting French actress Marion Cotillard for lunch at a 5-star hotel restaurant in the 8th arrondissement for a magazine interview. Cotillard, the 31-year-old César winner (the French equivalent of the Oscar), played Édith Piaf in the amazing La Vie en Rose this year. Here in France, the film was called La Môme. I sat down with actress/director Julie Delpy in the spring, star and screenwriter of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset and it was my pleasure. Before Sunrise was such a touchstone of my 20s that I stuck the film in an erotica story I wrote long ago, “Diva Moves.” Anyway, Marion Cotillard’s next film should be Nine, alongside Penélope Cruz, Sophia Loren and Catherine Zeta-Jones, a movie by Chicago director Rob Marshall.