Midlife Musings and "Before Midnight"

The cinematic journey of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) now spans three films, eighteen years, and multiple countries. You don't have to have seen the two preceding films chronicling their love story, "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset," but "Before Midnight" is much more effective if you're already familiar with the characters' histories and the series' format.

The couple are now in their forties, enjoying the waning days of a summer in the Peloponnesian region of Greece. A lot has happened since we saw them last. Jesse divorced, married Celine, and they have a pair of twin daughters. However, thanks to a severe falling-out with his ex-wife, he doesn't get to see his son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) very often, and feels like he's neglecting him. The opening scenes follow Jesse dropping Hank off at the airport, before being driven home by Celine, sparking the beginning of another long, rambling, revealing conversation that will carry us through the film. We learn their lives have become busy and complicated. We learn that significant tensions and conflicts have resulted.

The earlier installments of the "Before" series impressed me for being so well written and so good at capturing the nuances of a very specific, but fascinating relationship between two people who only met by chance. The movies are deceptively simple, just following the pair around a picturesque locale as they converse, and intensely personal. Hawke and Delpy have screenplay credits alongside Richard Linklater, the series' chief architect and director. I think "Before Midnight" may be my favorite of the set, though, because it departs from the formula in several ways, and because it tackles a stage of life that is very rare to see handled on screen so well and so honestly. This is the movie where the relationship itself finally becomes as important a force as the two personalities who share it.

Encroaching middle age and the diminishment of romantic passion aren't all that uncommon to see in films, but rarely do you get to know the people involved the way longtime viewers know Jesse and Celine. We've seen them as bright-eyed twenty-somethings and more tempered thirty-somethings. We know about Celine's passionate ambitions and her strong convictions. We know about Jesse's more laid-back approach to life, his occasional carelessness, and the course that his writing career has taken. "Before Midnight" also picks up many threads from "Before Sunset," so we learn the consequences of Jesse's terribly romantic decision at the end of the previous movie, which have had nine years to play out. As the pair wend their way through the day together, the details are filled in gradually.

The nine year gap didn't hit me quite so hard the last time, as I watched "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset" fairly close together, a few years after the second movie. This time it did, possibly because I experienced the interval closer to real time, or because my own relationships had progressed to the point where I could make some comparisons. Jesse and Celine felt slightly removed from time prior to this, two picture-perfect lovebirds rambling around Vienna and Paris, having these erudite conversations. But with so much of this outing involving their children, and encounters with other people, bits of the modern world inevitably intrude here. Little things like the references to Skype and old cartoons made me acutely aware of the existence and passage of time in the "Before" universe.

Also, touching lightly on some spoiler territory here, "Before Midnight" also sees a momentous event in the couple's relationship that is different from the past ones, though handled just as well. This makes the film an unexpectedly gripping watch, because Linklater and his actors are treading in very different territory. We're not looking at two people contemplating the potential for a relationship anymore, but a long-estaplished pair trying to figure out how to deal with a very solid and weighty reality that they live with every day. The romance isn't over, but reality has sunk in. We find they've made sacrifices for thier marriage, expended great effort to keep it going, and perhaps both aren't quite so happy with how it all turned out.

I'm not in the camp that would like to see the "Before" movies go on indefinitely the way the famous "Up" documentary series has, following its subjects into old age. However, I think there's definitely room for another movie or two, to follow up with Jesse and Celine at another stage in their lives, further down the road. Even if we don't get a "Before Noon" in 2022, this has been an extraordinary run of movies, up there with the best of all time. You have to go back to Bergman and Truffaut and Satyajit Ray to really find anything comparable.

And it's my favorite film of the year to date.
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