Before Midnight (5/5)
The Before films
never previously dealt with relationships.
Or at least they never dealt with the day in, day out labor of
maintaining a relationship over the course of years. Before
Sunrise lovingly details the opening stages of romance, and Before Sunset reignites this
relationship while including the added pressures of growing older. Before
Midnight, then, is the first of this series to actually investigate how
Jessie and Celine might function as a married couple entering into middle age
together.
As its impossibly gorgeous European locale, Before Midnight takes Greece. Jessie has been invited to a kind of summer
writers program at the home of a Grecian author. Jessie’s son from his first marriage, Hank, has
spent his summer in Greece
with Jessie and Celine. The film’s
opening sees Jessie sending Hank back home, and it captures the nice dynamic
between an inarticulate early teen and his loquacious father. Jessie keeps on trying to engage his son in
conversation, but Hank doesn’t bite, and you start to think that maybe the
relationship between the two is strained.
But before passing through security, Hank blurts out that this has been
the best summer of his life. Jessie
returns to Celine and their twin blonde headed moppets who are waiting outside
the airport, but it is clear that the geographical divide between he and his
son weighs on Jessie, a problem that has subtly torn at Celine and Jessie’s
relationship.
Like the two prior films, Before Midnight could easily have been produced as a stage
play. The film can be divided into at
least four distinct parts: the drive home from the airport, the Grecian dinner
party, the walk to the hotel, and the confrontation at the hotel. In each section, the camera maintains long
shots that hold for what I would imagine are at least ten minutes at a
time. The drive home appears to be
nearly one long shot. But Ethan Hawke
and Julie Delpy have developed such charisma and so easily inhabit these
characters that their back and forth creates a kind of suspense. We wish to know what each character will say
next.
The movie’s fulcrum is a playful dinner scene where several
generations of diners discuss the possibilities and permutations of
relationships. A twenty-something couple
who are clearly infatuated with each other at the same time deny that monogamy
is even possible. A couple, around the
same age as Jessie and Celine, clearly takes a cynical view of their
relationship and never really take it seriously. The elderly host, meanwhile, speaks to the
necessity of always being two in a relationship, of never fully melding your
identity with that of your husband or wife.
In one story that’s bandied about, a guest recounts a lengthy
autobiography/letter left behind by her grandmother where her husband only
takes up a grand total of a few pages.
For this woman, her female friends were the relationships she truly
cherished.
The entire film culminates with a confrontation in a hotel
room. As a present, Jessie and Celine
were given a hotel room for the night so that they could get away from their two
daughters and have a romantic evening.
This eventually results in a truly epic fight. But on their walk to the hotel, the two
engage in the kinds of conversations that we have come to expect from these
two. At the same time it is clear that
after nine years, these little tete-a-tete’s have become increasingly
rare. After reaching the hotel, their
romantic evening is stymied by an argument that begins with an off handed
comment Jessie made earlier about wanting to move back to the States in order
to be closer to his son, a comment which resulted in a number of subtle and not
so subtle jabs by Celine over the course of the day. But soon the argument veers off in a number
of directions, building on nine years of issues left unresolved.
Perhaps the closest cinematic equivalent to the blow up
between Celine and Jessie is the Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor drama Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? But despite the level of anger and the deep
wounds Celine and Jessie inflict on one another over the course of this
argument, it never quite veers into the bleak cynicism of Wolf. Burton
and Taylor’s
characters love seemed to manifest only when they were tearing at one
another. It knew no other form. We know that Celine and Jessie are capable of
transcending all of the every day difficulties of life. Hawke, Delpy, and Linklater also manage to
stage the fight in such a way that it veers from raw to humorous. A combatant might spew an argument ending
decree only to come back with an “And another thing…” The filmmakers are also careful to take the
complaints of disappointments and unmet needs seriously. Neither character is fully right nor
wrong. When Celine engages in a typical
feminist argument that she is burdened with the childcare, we might not fully
agree with the degree of her claims. But
at the same time it’s clear that Jessie is attempting to position her as the
irrational female. No doubt, there is some
truth in Celine’s critique that sexism affects their relationship.
Before entering the hotel, Jessie and Celine sit by the Mediterranean watching the sunset. Jessie narrates the sun’s disappearance over
some seaside cliffs: “Still there. Still there. Still there. It’s gone.” The fight in the hotel room is at times so
mean spirited, so vicious that it could easily be the end. Their relationship might one day be there and
the next gone. And like the previous two
films, things end somewhat ambiguously.
We are not given full closure on the story of Jessie and Celine, because
as an audience, we must leave before their narrative is truly over. But call me an optimist, because I think
these two will stay together long into old age.
Despite it all, they are just too interesting together to break up.
It’s hard to overstate what the trio of Hawke, Delpy, and
Linklater have accomplished with the Before
Trilogy. Each successive movie only
deepens these characters. And the themes
have become more nuanced, more multifaceted with time. If Before
Midnight isn’t the most enjoyable of the three movies (and that’s not to
say it is ever dull), it is perhaps the best of the trilogy. My guess is that Midnight marks the end of this series, but without a doubt the
relationship between Jessie and Celine lives on in the minds of their
fans. The characters seem to live
outside of the screen.
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