Before Midnight

Richard Linklater – 2013 – USA

Spoiler Alert, kind of. 

Before Midnight takes Richard Linklater, one of my favorite active filmmakers, in a challenging and admirable direction.  The first two films in this series – Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) – each spending a single day with the characters Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) – were so openly romantic that Linklater ran the risk of going stale if he made a third installment that was more-or-less the same thing, which is surely what many fans expected.  Nine years after we last saw the couple, they have been married for some time, have twin daughters and live in Paris.  We catch them on a vacation in Greece where Jesse’s son from a previous marriage has been visiting.  Although life has certainly set in for the couple, they are still cute and open with each other, joking and touching, comfortable alone as well as with company.  The first half of the film is comprised of several long conversations – of the kind so familiar to Linklater fans – in which some minor gripes bubble up, but mostly reveal the couple as intelligent and genuine.  Later, though, friends give them a gift of a night in a hotel so they can be alone without the children.  Neither of them want to go and they have to be talked into it.  They are wise to be wary, because once in the artificial setting designed to inspire romance, the tone takes a surprisingly dark turn into John Cassavetes or Woody Allen territory.  A few slight irritations spark a terrible fight in which Jesse and Celine do their utmost to hurt each other with an endless list of festering resentments, which include all the same things that millions of couples deal with; suspicions about infidelity, feelings of being taken for granted, jabs at sexual failings, etc, etc.  Ultimately, there is a truce of sorts, but it is so thin; nothing is guaranteed when the film ends except for a brief period of good will until something else rekindles the fight.  The earlier films made no promises of successful romance either, but in both cases, they captured a magical moment in two peoples’ lives; one that was rewarding in its own context whether the couple makes a life together or never cross paths again.  By this time, as they are both around 40, the youthful wistfulness and idealism that characterized the prior films has worn thin.  This was a bold move on Linklater’s part because even though he threatens to alienate the audiences who have loved and looked forward to these movies, he also creates greater suspense for a further chapter than existed in either of the other two films.