Before Midnight is the third and final film of the Before Trilogy written and directed by Richard Linklater. Released in 2013, it invites the viewer back into the lives of Jesse and Celine. It is nine years since we last saw them on the verge of igniting their relationship in Paris in the second film of the trilogy Before Sunset. This final instalment is tonally divergent from the first two. The bubble that they both existed in is now being reshaped by the vagaries of reality. The fault lines we saw subtly being established in the first two films are now being firmly wrenched apart testing the strength of their bond.
In a touching opening scene, Jesse is saying goodbye to his teenage son Hank at an airport in Greece as he prepares to fly back to his mother in the US. The opening shot shows two pairs of feet walking in unison along the airport terminal intimating the closeness of father and son. Jesse expresses surprise that Hank wants to quit playing soccer and that he has also lost interest in playing the piano. He gently tries to coerce him into not quitting these activities despite his son’s desire to do other things.
One is reminded of Jesse’s declaration to Celine on a train in 1995 that he could never get overly excited for other people’s plans for him. Jesse, in father mode, seems to have forgotten this and becomes guilty of the same parental approach. The bond is clear however. Hawke’s look of complete despondence as his son crosses the threshold is very affecting. His bereft walk through the airport afterwards is closely reminiscent of the denouement of Before Sunrise directly after leaving Celine at the train station in Vienna. His heart wounded in both scenes, but for very different reasons.
The camera follows Jesse out of the airport to a parked car with Celine standing beside it. The camera pans further around the car to reveal two sleeping twin girls in the back seat - two mini Delpys. If the first two films contained any level of romanticism, Before Midnight gradually and very deliberately dismantles any semblance of it in the twelve minute car -ride from the airport. Work issues arise for Celine; Jesse is preoccupied with his lingering guilt over leaving his son. This is a different Jesse and Celine, a couple who are now entrenched in the suffocating aspects of parenthood and work. Linklater, in the commentary, spoke of how he wanted the viewer to be properly reintroduced to the couple in this sequence. And we certainly are. Jesse asks Celine to pass him what is left of his daughter’s half -eaten apple from the back seat. The clearly browned edges of the apple do not deter him from munching on it. We will always have Vienna.
Jesse and Celine have always been an entity unto themselves. The entirety of the first two films consists of conversations between the two characters interspersed by fleeting dalliances with other transient characters. In the dinner scene, we now get to witness the couple in their first social setting with others, eating dinner al fresco at the home of an elderly fellow writer named Patrick, his grandson and his girlfriend, his friend Natalia and a Greek couple - neighbours of Patrick’s. The actor who plays Patrick was a cinematographer by trade named Walter Lassally. He received an Oscar for his cinematography on the film Zorba the Greek in 1965. The character he plays in the film is loosely based on the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor who wrote A Time of Gifts which recounts his walk across Europe in the 1930s. To cap it off, the beautiful Greek home in this scene was in fact owned by Fermor himself and Linklater positions Lassally in almost the same position that Fermor sat in the photograph below. Fermor had only passed away two years prior to the production of the film in 2011.
Lassally’s lack of experience as an actor is quite noticeable when interacting with the likes of Hawke and Delpy. However it could also easily be construed as a certain eccentricity of character if one chooses to be more sympathetic in their evaluation. The conversation at the dinner scene turns to technology and how AI might well replace the act of creativity - Jesse wonders if AI might someday write a great novel and surpass any human achievements in this arena. This conversation is startlingly prescient re-watching the film in 2023, ten years later. Linklater has always had a preoccupation with alternative realities, technology and our perception of time. His rotoscopic animated gem Waking Life released in 2001, sees the main character engage in several fragmented conversations with characters exploring ideas like existentialism, lucid dreaming and situationist politics. There even exists a short sequence where we see Hawke and Delpy in bed, playing Jesse and Celine, conversing about collective memory and reincarnation.
The dinner scene becomes somewhat awkward when Celine overshares details about Jesse’s need to potentially move back to Chicago to be geographically closer to his son Hank. They currently reside in Paris. Jesse had only very subtly expressed a need to be closer to his son as he got older in the car scene before. Celine proceeds to air her grievance regarding this in a very public manner in front of the dinner party. The dividing line between the private and the public seems to be much more fluid for Celine. It could also be a result of having been around the guests for the last six weeks that has allowed her to feel comfortable sharing such information. It does manage to introduce a wedge that will be more vigorously lodged in their relationship in the subsequent hotel scene - a bloodbath of a scene which admirers of the classical romanticism of Before Sunrise will struggle to watch.
Linklater manages to get Jesse and Celine back to walking in front of the camera through the plot device of Patrick’s Greek neighbours having gifted the couple a night in a local hotel allowing them time way from the twins and the stresses of family life. This is reassuringly familiar and even nostalgic territory for the viewer but not for the couple. Neither of them can remember the last time they were away from their children. They walk from Patrick’s house to the hotel through beautiful adjoining countryside and we are back in step with the pair - ruminating on whether they would get off a train in Vienna if they met that day. Celine probes Jesse on these subjects in a manner which is one part humour, two parts genuine. She notices that all the red in Jesse’s beard has gone: an aspect of his appearance that she admits made her fall in love with him. The comments are barbed but both seem to possess a high threshold for this mode of communication. Any sense of playfulness however quickly evaporates a few minutes into the hotel scene.
Upon entering the beautiful hotel room, both take advantage of the situation by becoming physically intimate. This is very quickly interrupted by Celine’s phone ringing in the other room. It is Hank, Jesse’s son, letting her know that he landed in the US safely and that all is well. This is the second time Hank has communicated with Celine on the phone since he left Greece on his flight. On both occasions, Jesse listens to the conversations wondering why it is not his phone Hank decides to call. It is clear Celine and Hank have a close relationship and it plays on his already growing paternal insecurities. The phone call has also interrupted their attempt to make love and when Celine attempts to rekindle the mood, Jesse’s mind is now firmly back on Hank and his need to be close to him. From here it descends into an all out blistering argument with sporadic moments of calm where the viewer is lulled into a false sense that they might reach a resolution, while suddenly flaring up into a verbal war again.
Celine vents her deep frustrations at not being able to fulfil her creative impulses due to motherhood- she used to write songs. The waltz she wrote and sang for Jesse in the closing scene of Before Sunset is all but a distant memory. It would be a death march or dirge Celine would be writing now in this scene if handed an acoustic guitar. The absence of the twins has not enabled them to be closer but instead to grapple with all the issues that were bubbling under the surface over the last few months and years. Jesse scolds Celine’s neuroticism and inability to accept that he has given his whole life over to her and their children. The culmination of the argument comes in the form of seven words uttered by Celine before she leaves the hotel room by herself: ‘I don’t think I love you anymore.’ Where is Vienna again exactly?
Jesse finds Celine sitting alone on a stunningly picturesque waterside section of the hotel. He launches into a flight of fancy about being a time traveller and draws on all his narrative acumen to attempt to heal the wounds. This is Jessie trying to coax Celine off the train again, except this time the train is travelling quickly away from him with Celine now more absent and distant than ever. What transpires in this scene is what makes the trilogy so appealing. It depicts the messiness of relationships, of motherhood and fatherhood but it also shows us what real love is. It shows us the redemptive power of love, the healing power of love if willing to accept it. The scene caps off the trilogy in a way that balances romantic nostalgia perfectly with a sense of realism that serves to temper any potential descent towards sentimentality or melodrama.
The Before Trilogy punctuated my life over an eighteen year period from the young 15 year old seeing Before Sunrise in Galway city to the 32 year old English teacher living in the UK seeing Before Midnight in the Barbican in London. I aged with Jesse and Celine. I grew with them both, my reality being shaped by theirs as the years rolled on. The films made me search. They made me explore. They made me greedy for experience. They made me look at the world around me with fresh eyes and new vision. It is these things that enabled me to find my own Celine. A woman I can co-pilot through life with. A woman who inspires me. A woman I love deeply. We will always have Vienna.