I plead guilty to letting my pen flow freely and not responding precisely to your points. But how was I to know that you had lived a long time in Marseille?

If many viewers of the new Linklater film haven't seen the earlier one, after all they are nine years apart. That the new one is richer for knowing the first is something I commented on in my original review that started this thread, in my second sentence. As for my "fellow N. Americans," they constitute the main readers on this site, so I need not address myself especially to them; everything we write is consumed by them. I will now bear in mind that you are a special case, a person with a European background. I addressed myself to you to show your last post was my starting point, but Howard has been the prime mover lately, and the Rohmer discussion is one that has played a key role on this thread--you participated too, so I thought you would welcome a comment on the use of pauses, a point that has come up lately, from Howard.

In my last post I said a lot about smoking. You may feel this was a pointless ramble, but I'd thought it important to develop this theme if we're to make any sense out of what to me seemed a completely incidental moment in Before Sunset. The whole reason for all this talk is that Howard Schumann made a big fuss about it. He fairly rejected the whole film because of it. I like your interpretation better, though I still think it's a bit fanciful. If Linklater is doing what you say with the smoking, he's a subtler ironist than I realized, but the irony is blunted by the French setting. What this may mean is that perhaps Howard is right and the Parisian background is just "postcard" pictures and, because the director is American, socially and intellectually we are not really in France. I think it's just as good a refutation of Howard's fuss to say the cigarettes don't mean much of anything, they're just part of the furniture of the scene. Howard is having recourse as he tends to do -- that is his approach to reviewing films, and it can be a valuable one -- to evaluating the film on idealistic and moral rather than social or aesthetic grounds. I'd say the film is about people very like the real people who play the characters, and hence it all gets rather muddled.