Review of Before Midnight (2013) by Thegodfatherson — 09 Jun 2013

It’s the mark of a great script when some of the most profound lines are just tossed into the midst of a conversation, unremarked upon and quickly lost in the flow of dialogue. We all get dragged through our parents’ lives,” says Celine, a Frenchwoman whose raw intelligence is only matched by her impulsive emotions.

Jesse, a writer and Celine’s common-law husband, offers this: “If we were ever going to truly know each other, we’d probably have to get to know ourselves better first.” Jesse and Celine are played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, and they have been for almost 20 years.

The characters were first introduced in the charming 1995 romance Before Sunrise, as students who meet on a train and spend the night ambling through Vienna, talking of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Nine years later, in Before Sunset, Jesse is giving a reading at Paris’s Shakespeare and Company bookshop, and Celine comes to see him. Another peripatetic conversation follows, but did Jesse miss his plane back to his wife and child in New York? Nine more years and we have an answer in Before Midnight.

Jesse and Celine are living in Paris, parents to twin eight-year-old girls. In the long opening scene (all the scenes are long, and perfectly so) Jesse is at the Kalamata airport saying goodbye to his son, who has spent part of his summer vacation with them in southern Greece.

There are only a few more scenes in the movie. Jesse and Celine drive back to their vacation spot, a writer’s retreat presided over by a congenial old man. (He’s played by 86-year-old Oscar-winning cinematographer Walter Lassally in his acting debut!) They chat with friends before and during dinner.

They walk to a nearby hotel, where their hosts have given them the luxury of a night away from the kids. They have a fight, and in the midst of Jesse’s apology, the movie ends. Will they make it through another nine years? As with real-life couples, no one knows.

Writer/director Richard Linklater is no George Lucas, with a carefully (or perhaps not-so-carefully) plotted trilogy of trilogies. He and co-writers Hawke and Delpy make this stuff up as they go. For the fans, it almost makes sense to imagine Jesse and Celine as a couple you’ve lost touch with.

With luck, you’ll hear from them again one day, bringing you up to date on their lives. It’s instructive to note, however, that while Before Midnight doesn’t end on a cliffhanging note, it’s also open to interpretation.

I think the characters will muddle through into old age together; others will tell you they give the relationship another six months, tops. The characters feel so real that the kind of foibles that might normally be charged to the actor or filmmaker instead feel like faults of the characters.

It drove me mad that Jesse always has half his shirt untucked, but apparently that’s just Jesse. And when Celine raises her voice and drops her IQ to tease her mate by pretending to be a bimbo, it made me realize what an actress she is.

Almost as good as Julie Delpy. An old woman talks about how the memory of her dead husband was always strongest in the morning, before the sun made it fade. Someone else describes the differing reactions of male and female coma patients upon awakening.

In other ways, it’s refreshingly on par. Linklater has a new cinematographer in Christos Voudouris, but the camera still finds ways to unobtrusively jog alongside the protagonists, and it knows when to just be still.

Given that more than 10 minutes of the film takes place in the front seat of a car, and at least that much in a smallish hotel suite, Linklater makes great use of minimal space and available light. It all adds up to a wondrous third meeting, with concomitantly higher expectations for the fourth.

Some critics have argued that Linklater and company should quit while they’re ahead, but the same was said of the last film, and it’s a good thing that road was not taken. I leave you with two scenes to ponder.

In one, the couple playfully contemplates their mortality, calculating how much longer they would have to stay together to match the record of Jesse’s recently deceased grandparents. In another, the fragility of time passing is caught by the rays of the sun, sinking toward the horizon as they watch from a seaside restaurant.