BEFORE MIDNIGHT (re-review) - #859

“It’s not time that they’re lost in, but perception.”

And perception is key to this review of Before Midnight, the closing chapter of the Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy. I reviewed this film enthusiastically upon its release in 2013 [read it here], but I have not re-read that piece since re-posting it to this blog. Thus, I come to Before Midnight fresh, hot on the heels of watching and reviewing the first two entries (Before Sunrise and Before Sunset), building my impressions as I go. If I contradict my previous self in this outing, it’s to be forgiven, the product of time passing, personal change, and different perceptions based on where one sits at any particular moment.

Jesse and Celine, as embodied by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, certainly sit in different places than we have seen them before. The kids of Before Sunrise searching for a meaningful life have found one. They are in what is probably a common-law marriage with children--twin girls from this union, and a son from Jesse’s former marriage. She is a successful environmental activist, he is a popular novelist. The movie finds them on a vacation in Greece, hosted by an elder statesmen of literature, sharing the time with three other couples. Before Midnight is the first movie of the Before Trilogy to open up and give us not just glimpses of Jesse and Celine interacting with others at length, but interacting with other people without each other. It breaks the mold, to a degree, but as with all the choices made across the three films, this is done with purpose: we have to see them come back together. The presence of others in their lives isn’t necessarily driving them apart, but there has to be a certain reminder of what it means for them to be together alone.

We probably should have braced ourselves for the melancholy at the jump. Before Midnight opens with Jesse dropping his son at the airport, sending him back to America and his mother. The child can only visit in summers and on holidays, and Jesse’s melancholy over the situation sparks a slow-burning argument about what he and Celine may want. She is faced with a potential job change, a step up in the political world but a surrender of sorts, since it will take her away from the small but effective campaigns that do a lot of good when they work. But, is Jesse’s suggestion of spending more time with the son really a suggestion that they uproot everything and move to America?

It’s the seed of what will become an argument in the second half of the movie. The first half shows them socializing with the other vacationers. The group is almost like a capsule of the Trilogy itself, with a young couple, another middle-aged couple, and then an older non-couple, a widower and a widow who show two sides of a future where you outlive your spouse. The discussion careens through these points of view, covering not just relationships, but technology, dreams, and memory. It’s happy times, with just an undercurrent of the animosity that will fuel the film’s second half, when Jesse and Celine go off on their own for a romantic night that turns into anything but.

But first, we see them walking from the villa to the local hotel, a glimpse of the couple we have come to know, chatting and laughing and sharing ideas. They revisit old themes, like death and time. There’s a lot of talk about time, how it’s too slow when you’re young and too fast when you’re old. And how one marks its passage, how we measure the events of our lives. In some sense, the important happenings are still stretched out on the same continuum that Jesse proposes in Before Sunset, with the audience being blessed with the macro view, knowing that Celine isn’t entirely right when she says they have not changed at all, but also not entirely wrong. We’ve watched in a way they cannot.

There is an increased familiarity that informs Before Midnight: our familiarity with the characters and their familiarity with each other, but also the relationship between the performers and the filmmakers. There is a comfort here, and known tropes to fall back on, but also an even more natural rapport. Linklater and his actors are infusing their years together into how they portray the same level of time having passed between their avatars. Everything just feels right. Maybe Celine really is correct. There’s a consistency to their union we appreciate...

(l to r) Hawke, Delpy, & Linklater, ca. Before Sunset

...and that they doubt. If this is a couple’s midlife crisis, consistency is at the heart of it. Not just the boring or reliable stuff, but a consistency of mistakes, of character flaws, of foibles. Long-term couples always advise younger lovers that the secret to a relationship’s success is hard work, it’s not all magic. Before Midnight is a portrait of that. It’s actually kind of exciting to watch, mostly because we so rarely see this kind of relationship on screen. (Though Bergman comes to mind.)

It’s almost impossible not to watch Ethan Hawke’s Jesse at this stage and not think of his similar character in Boyhood [review]. The rock-and-roll dad who still wants to be cool, and thus appears unreliable, who lives separate from the child, but who means well. On that front, we also must consider Julie Delpy’s character in her own films, 2 Days in Paris [review] and 2 Days in New York [review]. She brings a lot of the same anxieties to that role, but amplified to the point of being alienating. In those movies you wish the couples would split; in the Before Trilogy, you wish they’d stay together.

If they do, it’s still up to you. Before Midnight keeps the conceit laid out at the beginning of Before Sunset. How you decide the fate of Jesse and Celine depends on what baggage and beliefs you bring to the table. In this case, though, it’s not really a question of how romantic you are, but how much do you believe in true love, in a deep connection. Jesse practically says it himself in his casual reference to the Bee Gees. At the same time, I once again wonder how much of this was planned from the start. If it wasn’t, credit to Linklater and his collaborators for finding the clues he and Kim Krizan left for them in Before Sunrise. Remember that time travel concept Jesse uses to convince Celine to jump off the train with him? It’s ripe to make a return. Before Midnight seemingly ends, but really, it takes us back to the start, to the initial “will they or won’t they.” It’s time to take another jump...or get on separate trains.

It’s all down to your perception. And how you interpret the way Jesse and Celine have shared with you their own perceptions of the time they spent together. There is no right answer, no one single timeline from here, but one for each person partaking in the experience.

BEFORE SUNSET - #858

Confession: I didn’t see Before Sunset during its theatrical run, it was a couple of years before I finally gave in and checked it out. I had dismissed the notion of a sequel to Before Sunrise [review], being in my early 30s and still full of strange and precious ideals about story, I had rejected the idea that the magic could be recaptured or that we needed to know if Jesse and Celine ever saw each other again. It wasn’t until the graphic designer working on my graphic novel with Joëlle Jones, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her, gave me a DVD copy and insisted that I give it a try that I finally did. And was pleasantly surprised.

I mention this in part because how Jesse (still played by Ethan Hawke) answers the questions about the book he wrote fictionalizing the events of Before Sunrise sounds a lot like how I answer questions about my books. Specifically, the “did they or didn’t they” ending being a litmus test for how romantic you are. I give the same answer about the ending of 12 Reasons Why I Love Her.

Clarification: I am re-watching each movie of the Before Trilogy and writing about it afterwards. Thus, when I wrote my Before Sunrise review, I had not yet watched Before Sunset, and so when I wrote that each moment of that movie was every moment of the series, I had no idea that Jesse says the same thing, also in the scene discussing his book, in this entry. What can I say, we share a wavelength.

And the Affair to Remember [review] comparison? Fitting that the reunion of Jesse and Celine echoes the “did you or didn’t you” of the final scenes of the Leo McCarey film, though with a much lighter touch...before moving on. In Affair it was the end; in Sunset, the start.

Before Sunset is the very definition of a middle part of a trilogy. It’s a bit darker, a bit more serious. It feels incomplete, acting as the connection between the kick-off and the finale. And like most second parts, many fans are going to argue that it’s the best. For all the reasons cited.

Richard Linklater gets this. He’s not setting out to make a crowd-pleasing affirmation of Before Sunrise’s goopier potentialities. Before Sunset has a level of sincerity about what it means to be in one’s 30s that underlines how sincere its predecessor was about capturing the airiness of being in your early 20s. They’ve had a whole life to live, to fail, to lose or hang onto their romantic notions. Amusingly, Jesse is more hopeful now, and Celine (Julie Delpy) is a politically driven realist. Where their paths diverged somehow caused him to increase his belief, and for her to tamp her romance down. Then again, he is also in an unhappy marriage, so maybe by being so grounded he can appreciate feelings that are less so. I mean, there is a definite irony to her being jaded by romance, when he suffered the true disappointment; yet, her failure to carry through has arrested her emotional development. She is not sure she can ever again feel the way she did during their Viennese dalliance.

Though, even as she points out, Jesse has arrested himself. He has chosen to stay in that moment, regardless of how much his life charges on. The impetus for their reunion in Before Sunset is that he has written a novel about their one night together, and the book tour has brought him to Paris. This adds a fun metatextual layer to the movie. They are fictional characters that, at least for a brief period of the movie, are grappling with fictional versions of themselves. More importantly, though, it brings up the question of perception: his version of events vs. hers.

Or, perhaps more precisely, it questions the quality of a particular witness or narrator: how does their retelling of Before Sunrise change based on what they prefer to hide or celebrate. Of course, those alterations are based on what they feel and what they wish to suppress or keep secret--a tactic that spills over into how they represent their current life. Both begin with a desire to present their best face, forgetting that they are with the only person who is really capable of unmasking their pretenses. And they only have a couple of hours to get the job done. He has to leave for the airport at 7:30.

Fitting into the collegiate preoccupations both Jesse and Celine had in Before Sunrise, Before Sunset uses their ill-fated first reunion as a way to ponder questions of faith, the “what if” scenarios suggesting a different path for the wannabe lovers. Sure, they would have been different if they had seen it through, but not necessarily for the better. Is it possible that they needed to shed their youthful ideology in order to really be together? Would they have lasted if they had run with that first blush of emotion and not gathered the life experience that would give them the tools and tenacity to commit? Probably not. And thus, it is befitting that Before Sunset fails to end with a grand declaration, fading out instead on a quiet recommitment to love.

In terms of style and approach, not much has changed here, though it’s clear that budget and nearly a decade of work under their belts has improved all skills. The camerawork is cleaner, the look of the film more polished--but that could be an uptick in technology giving all indie filmmakers a leg up. Lee Daniel shot both movies, as he has many Linklater efforts, including Dazed and Confused [review 1, 2] and Boyhood [review], so I imagine the two had quite a rapport by this outing. Daniel also has a lot of documentary credits on his resume, which suggests certain skills he certainly could apply here.

Luckily, this progression helps rather than hurts. If the first film has the scruffiness of youth, this has the sheen of success, the characters showing off at a time when they can and when making sure everyone knows you’ve accomplished something matters. It can’t be the same every time...and as we’ll see, it won’t be.

BEFORE SUNRISE - #857

My first thought in rewatching Before Sunrise was to wonder if they had a plan all along. Back in 1995, were writers Richard Linklater and Kim Krizan already looking ahead to 2013, imagining their decades-spanning Before Trilogy, and laying tracks for the relationship to come? Because it’s hard not to flash forward to the third chapter when Jesse and Celine’s relationship is experiencing friction while watching how it originally came together. [Link to my original Before Midnight review; link to my 2018 re-review.]

It’s all right there in the first scene. Celine (Julie Delpy) is reading  book on the train, and a German couple arguing forces her to retreat to another empty seat on the car. This puts her across from Jesse (Ethan Hawke), a fellow reader and another solo traveler. The bickering gives them a reason to chat, and Celine shares a factoid about how when men and women grow older, they physically lose the ability to hear each other; Jesse then wonders if that’s how couples manage to stay together, evolving to a state where they contentedly tune each other out. The problems of the old become the meet-cute of the young.

To examine this, to leap ahead in time, is to actually indulge in Jesse’s own winning argument for convincing Celine to leave the train: imagine yourself in twenty years, married with children, and you have no idea if one of those men you met but did not hook up with would have been more exciting than your boring, familiar husband. Jesse offers himself as the predictive answer, proposing that Celine see this excursion as a time travel experiment. And in a sense, this relationship will be timeless. Jesse and Celine are of this moment, and this moment is every moment, a time capsule that remains relevant even as it updates itself. This is version 1.0, and in nine years we will get 2.0, and nine more 3.0. Added layer for me: they meet on my birthday, so I probably feel the time more than any of you.

The future and mortality are running themes of the conversations in Before Sunrise--a movie that is, conceptually, one long chat, as the two young lovers stroll Vienna and get to know one another, the audience falling for the pair as they fall for one another. These morbid thoughts aren’t really surprising. Is there any stage of life where one feels a more pronounced obsession with death than in one’s youth? Is that not the whole point of Romantic poetry? One of the best things about Before Sunrise is how unashamedly young it is, how Linklater and Krizan lean into the grand ideas that possess a growing mind, no matter how silly or pretentious they may be. Thus we can forgive Jesse for his self-regard, surface-level “big” thinking, and sheer punchableness, his gray T-shirt and leather jacket, his grunge goatee. It was the early ’90s, after all. He looks like a version of Chris Cornell if Chris Cornell were a glass of milk that someone put ice cubes in and the ice had melted.

This paragraph is a placeholder/palate cleanser because I’m pretty proud of that image and I want you to take a second to really imagine it.

There’s a beauty to the writing here in how perfectly imperfect these two are for one another. The script could have simply relied on the cliché division between Europeans and Americans, that she is more sophisticated and worldly and he’s an accidental tourist waiting to happen; instead, it goes deeper into that divide to look at their personalities. Despite her fatalism, Celine is open to the world, ready to accept the proclamations of a grisly palm reader or the improvised street poetry of a homeless Lord Byron; Jesse is the know-it-all American male, too aware of the angles to enjoy the shape of them. It’s what leads to their only real conflict. Yet, we may also surmise that it’s no conflict at all, that he likes her daffy indulgences, and she appreciates how he preens for her. She’s smart enough to see that he needs to be seen as smart himself, confident enough to call him stupid, and enough of a romantic herself to take the compliment. One of the best scenes is watching her bust his ego by making fun of their first kiss. Credit to Hawke, he seems to get this guy, because he quickly turns the bruised feelings into self-aware laughter.

Both performances here are easygoing, natural, and unaffected--perfectly in sync with the ultra-indie shooting style (nothing fancy here, just the actors, the camera, and the city). Hawke is more prone to acting, including demonstrative hand gestures and fidgety business, but it fits how Jesse himself is performing. On her side of things, Celine is more laid back, perhaps less invested, but again, that fits her personality. She’s open to whatever happens, he’s intent on making it happen.

It’s a charming little dance, staying just on the right side of mawkish for most of the narrative to allow for the filmmakers to go whole hog at the end, stamping Before Sunrise with an Affair to Remember-style ending, where a promise is made to prove this is more than a one-night stand by returning to the spot where they parted in six months time.

Only for us it would it would be considerably longer than that before we’d find out if that promise remained unbroken.

BEFORE MIDNIGHT - #859

I intend to review the full Before Trilogy when the release comes out this February, but in the meantime, here is my original review of Before Midnight written for DVDTalk.com for the movie's theatrical release in 2013.

It hit me with a heavy thud early on in Before Midnight when Ethan Hawke's Jesse expresses his disbelief that he is now 41 years old: I have been the exact same age as the characters in this series whenever each movie has come out. The initial meeting between Jesse and Celine (Julie Delpy) happened when we were all 22 (Before Sunrise [review]), and then ten years later in Before Sunset [review], at the onset of our 30s (so far the best decade in terms of growing up and growing old), and now we rejoin the narrative as we are settling into middle age.

I'll be curious to hear what my younger friends take away from Before Midnight. The ongoing relationship and occasional romance that the characters have with one another, and which they also have with us, the audience, is not getting any easier, even as it grows more comfortable. Despite a decade together and all the ups and downs that come with it, the relationship between these two (dare we say?) soulmates is just as deeply furrowed as it's always been. They can joke together and they can appreciate the wonders of the world, but they also disagree and fail to communicate and have to push hard to keep the love standing between them.

[Note: Other reviewers have treated some of the plot details about Before Midnight as spoilers; I don't think much of this hand-wringing is warranted. What I detail below is discovered within the first several minutes of the movie, but should you be concerned, don't read between the next two photographs. Then again, if you're that invested, why are you reading this instead of getting in line for a ticket?]

This third go-around, directed in the same au-naturale style by Richard Linklater, who has also shared co-writing credit with his stars since 2004's original sequel, finds Celine and Jesse in Europe at the tail-end of a vacation. Jesse has just put his son back on a plane to Chicago to be with his mother, and the farewell was tough. The boy is about to start high school, and Jesse realizes he has lived away from the child most of the kid's life. He and Celine have their own children, whom they live with in Paris, and Celine has a fulfilling job, all of which makes even the thought of moving the family to America problematic.

That's the essential situation that gets Before Midnight underway, providing the complications that will cause the extended conversation that forms the bulk of the film. There is one pitstop before the ball really gets rolling. Jesse and Celine are staying at the Greek villa of an older man who admires Jesse's writing. With them are two other couples: a funny, loving duo who are a generation ahead of Jesse and Celine, and a newer pair of lovers that are the same age that Jesse and Celine were in Before Sunrise. In a spirited dinner table conversation, Linklater and crew give us a full representation of the stages of life as they exist now, and how age and origin informs each romance. Alongside the older host (veteran cinematographer Walter Lassally) is a widow (Xenia Kalogeropoulou), who gives the film's most emotional monologue when remembering her late husband. It's this moment that sets up one of the film's main themes: the preciousness of time and how our memorializing of the same distorts it. It's a beautiful segment, and the first of many times I teared up during Before Midnight.

It's after this meal that Jesse and Celine depart on their own, heading down from the villa to spend a night alone in a hotel. Unfortunately, without saying much more about specifics, the tension that has been brewing between them reaches full steam, and the romantic night turns into a difficult argument. Both participants are equal part aggressor and victim. They are alternately cruel, unfair, and selfish. They are also vulnerable and protective of what they have, both as individuals and together. You will find your sympathies shifting back and forth. Jesse can't calm the situation without saying something stupid, whereas every time Celine gives an inch, she takes it back with sharp-tongued fury. Exposition is smartly folded into the back-and-forth, catching us up on what got them from Before Sunset to here, and the more we learn, the more we realize that they don't always know each other--or even themselves.

Which is the real heavy-duty truth that Before Midnight reveals about not just long-term relationships, but also what it's like to be in middle age. From what I am discovering, one's 40s are a period of self-assessment and self-doubt. Both Jesse and Celine are asking where the time has gone, reevaluating their decisions, and wondering how much time they have left to get it right. Listen to what they say, all of those things are in there. Likewise, they are questioning why their bodies are changing, why they are often not in control of their own impulses, and why despite four decades of wisdom, they can't change their worst traits (if they even need to). Being in your 40s feels like being a teenager again, you're suddenly not in control of your physical form or your mental and emotional state. For the past twelve months, I've personally been living in the I Heart Huckabees "How am I not myself?" rubber ball scene on perpetual loop, and so it struck me deeply to hear both Jesse and Celine ask the same basic question of each other: "How am I not the person you fell in love with?"

That Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy manage to balance so many things, to make their characters three-dimensional and flawed while also keeping them likable, and make Before Midnight as uplifting and cathartic as it is emotionally distressing, is really the secret to why this series has managed to sustain its quality and appeal. The level of talent on display here, the depth and nuance of the performances and of the writing, is incredible. I'd also posit that it's a chemistry that is impossible to replicate. Delpy has starred in and directed two very similar movies, 2 Days in Paris [review] and 2 Days in New York [review], both of which fail to conjure the same magic. She can't do it without Linklater or Hawke any more than they could do it without her and each other. It's like the Beatles as a unit vs. the Beatles apart. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

And so we are left again at an impasse, a momentary truce that may hold. Like the devastating ebbs and flows of the union in Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, we will never be sure from one entry to the next where our subjects will land. Somewhere on the internet, I am sure a Before... franchise fan has already started a doomsday clock counting down the next ten years, marking the time until we all meet again. The point, though, is not to count the minutes or the years, but to live them. Only then will the next reunion's lessons make sense, or even this one's be justified.

UPDATE: It took me over a year, but here is my 2018 review of Before Midnight.