[Note: Before Midnight is an especially difficult movie to write about, simply because for some people, even what has become of Jesse and Celine since Before Sunset is information that they don't want. But it's impossible — absolutely impossible — to write about the movie without talking about where they stand and what the premise is. I did my absolute best to spoil as little beyond that as possible. But if it's extremely important to you not to know whether he missed the plane, whether they've seen each other in the last nine years, or the rest of the table-setting that happens in the film's first few minutes (and if you've managed not to know until now), stop here.]
It took three movies for the stunning series made up of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and now Before Midnight to go back to the beginning.
And what was the beginning?
In 1995's Before Sunrise, directed like the other two films by Richard Linklater, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) spend a single romantic night together in Vienna. But that's not the beginning. Before they can spend that night together, they have to get off the train together. And before they get off the train together, they have to talk. And before they talk, they have to meet. And before they meet, that's the beginning.
Remember? They're on the train, and Celine gets up from her seat and moves, ultimately plunking herself down right across from Jesse and going back to the book she's reading. And he spots her out of the corner of his eye, an impossibly beautiful French girl, and he makes a little goggle-eyed smile into his book, because it's all just a little too unreal.
But that's not actually the beginning either.
In the very beginning, the reason Celine gets up and moves is that the middle-aged couple sitting near her is fighting in German, and she's tired of listening to it, even though she can't understand it. She winds up next to Jesse specifically because she's quietly but firmly put off by the ugliness of couplehood that's been corroded by years of togetherness; by familiarity that has bred contempt. The first conversation they ever have is about that couple, and the fact that Celine has heard that in time, couples literally lose the ability to hear each other — men lose their hearing of higher tones, and women of lower ones.
It took three movies and 20 years for Jesse and Celine to be the ones having the fight, and to worry that now that they've passed 40, they are becoming the couple they ran away from when they'd just passed 20. It's not hard to reshoot that scene in your mind's eye, with the 2013 Jesse and Celine fighting in the foreground while, in the background, the 1995 Jesse and Celine huddle to roll their eyes at those people who can't hear each other.
See, it turns out Jesse really did miss that plane at the end of Before Sunset, and he never really went home. They've been a couple ever since, and they have twin daughters, conceived shortly after they got together. His son and ex-wife live in Chicago and he's published more books; she's still a professional environmentalist. We meet them here in Greece, at the end of summer.
And they've learned, perhaps unsurprisingly, that if you think being separated for nine years is hard, you should try being together. Their relationship, originally so perfectly preserved and gorgeous in memory, has gotten scuffed and noisy and complicated. It's not just the two of them in a listening booth in a record store now. It's them and their daughters, and his son, and his ex-wife, and their friends, and their work, and ultimately everybody with the ability to intrude, which is ... everybody.
The neat trick of Before Sunrise was that as between the two of them, there were no obstacles for Jesse and Celine. They were perfect according to each other's greedy and generous interpretation. Everything that happened made them like each other more; every conversation they had made them seem more mutually well-suited. It's an almost perfect document of the intoxication of first meetings, of the sense that every time your phone wasn't ringing, this is the person who was supposed to be calling you, and every time you felt a space next to you, this is the person who was supposed to be in it.
The obstacles were simply guts and time; he had to get on a train in the morning so he could catch his flight home, and if they weren't going to get lost, somebody would have to find the nerve to say something before they parted. (Note, if you are under 25: we didn't have Skype or smartphones or Facebook then, so sometimes people we really liked got lost. P.S. Looking for them is one of the first things we did with Google.)
In the break between the first movie and Before Sunset, the big lingering question was whether they kept their promise to meet again six months later so they wouldn't get lost. The answer? They didn't. Life had intruded, and they'd gotten lost. That second leg of the story started with a broken promise, which announced that we were in a different place with these two. They knew more; more had happened to them. Still, they fell instantly into those same talks and walks. The obstacles were still external but more complex — professional obligations, other relationships, timing, geography, and the assorted bullpucky of life that keeps most things from ever happening. They had the opportunity to take a regret and transform it into a rescue, it seemed.
Did You Show Up in Vienna?
Before Sunset — MOVIECLIPS.com