I have so often seen people smoke in recent movies and wondered if they really don't smoke in real life, and if doing it for a film got them hooked. Unfortunately when you're 14 or 20 you don't think you're ever going to die and don't experience any ill effects so smoking doesn't worry you. I've heard that River Phoenix was required to smoke in his second film, Stand by Me, and that started him. Of course he was full of terrible contradictions, but he was one American who was a vegan and passionate animal rights and environmental activist (he wouldn't wear leather) who smoked, apart from all the other things he took up of an addictive nature. What I'm leading up to is that Ethan Hawke smokes, plenty, in real life, and Julie Delpy is French, so the chances are she has no compunctions about smoking; and there's nothing unusual about people smoking in a cafe or a restaurant because it's not restricted. It's unlikely they would smoke just for effect. The idea that their doing so while talking about environmentalism shows their contradictions is also a good and natural one, but whether this is Linklater's "intention" we don't know unless he says so. Moreover I repeat I really don't think in Europe being an enviro and smoking would likely be seen as contradictory because, I have to keep repeating it because it doesn't seem to be getting through, in Europe like in most of the rest of the world, everywhere but the world of the American white middle class, smoking isn't frowned on and is almost universal. One of the reasons Johnny Depp has given for liking to live in France is their attitude toward smoking. If you're a chain smoker and live in Berkeley like a Japanese artist friend of mine it means being treated like a pariah, and it's bad enough to know you have a bad habit, you don't want to be looked at funny all the time. You thought it improbable that anyone here would have seen 80% of Rohmer's output, but I think I have, and I can't think of any long pauses in conversations in the ones about men and women's relationships. What they do is have structural breaks because the films are segmented into meetings and days. Linklater as has been pointed out in connection with Before Sunset likes to work in real time, and decided to do that by giving Jessie a plane to catch. Real time means the pressure of time and as you say, in this case the pressure to get everything said. A narrative chopped up into fragments has no sense of urgency as a whole. Of course Jessie decides to miss his plane and the conversation is coming to an end some time soon as the film ends. We get our long awaited break from conversation in the final moments with Celine's song and then the big break, the film's end, comes and the beauty of it is we imagine things are just about to begin.