If I was impressed by the degree to which Julie Delpy showed the ugly side of the city of lights in 2 Days in Paris, then perhaps the only problem I ultimately had with Ethan Hawke’s tale of the complexities of love was that he kinda takes the same notion a little too far. I lost count of the number of times I changed sides during this movie’s first hour – both the guy and the girl alternating between gratingly annoying yet somehow perfectly understandable behaviour. For a good time, too, I couldn’t shake the thought that the movie would’ve been much better had it been made in the time of Reality Bites and Before Sunrise etc, with Hawke himself as the angry young man – rather than portraying that young man’s father slightly awkwardly as he does here – perhaps Winona Ryder or even Julie Delpy again in the role of the young woman.

It’s a very angry, angsty movie that will probably annoy a lot of people. There seems to me to be a lot of the self-absorbed Hawke we see in his Reality Bites character here – a character smart but one who’s really good wasting those smarts. And I’m not sure about the ending. But ultimately, I liked all the philosophical stuff that gets brought up around this character. Laura Linney’s couple of small scenes are stunning, “You are going to die. Relatively soon! So you have just two choices in life: you can deal with things badly, and be miserable, or you can deal with them well and be happy!”; and Ethan Hawke’s primary scene as the father at the end is a highlight too … “I don’t know what that says about me; but you bein’ here today, that says a hell of a lot about you.”

It’ll be better a second time around when I know what to expect. Seen alongside Delpy’s movie, it clearly lacks the warmth and humour, but in its own way it’s still a great thematic follow-up to the Linklater movies.