Before Midnight

Before Midnight (2013, MC-94, NFX) is the latest installment of Richard Linklater’s ongoing masterwork -- the “Before” series, which collectively could be titled à la Proust, “In Search of Lost Time.”   Made in close collaboration with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, as stars and co-writers, the three films to date, made at nine-year intervals, are obsessed with the passage of time, the interpenetration of past and future in the present, all the modes of time travel.  Each deals with one day in the life of a pair, American writer and French social activist, as they reflect on the past and imagine a future, as individuals and as a couple, trying to come to terms in and with the present moment. 

It doesn’t hurt that while each film is inordinately focused on just two people walking and talking, they do so in picturesque places – Vienna, Paris, and the Greek Islands.  And the two characters, whom we have watched age from their 20s to 30s to 40s, are extraordinarily appealing, in all their complexity of confrontation and evasion, showing the slippery side as well as the rough edges of each.  Permanence and mutability, connection and separation, fantasy and disenchantment, all the vicissitudes of a relationship over time are explored with wit and point. 

Though tightly scripted and rehearsed, and intimately intertwined with the characters’ prior incarnations, the endless back-and-forth seems spontaneous, even improvised.  And the three-headed creative process assures an even-handed, fully-rounded treatment of both the boy and the girl, the woman and the man.  We come to know Jesse and Celine as they come to know each other, for better and worse.  They’re funny and sharp, and they each have their reasons, and their unreasons.  There’s no denying that sparks fly, but will the fire burn itself out? 

Linklater contributes a deep sense of cinema history, setting the film in a great tradition, explicitly alluding to Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy, but obviously indebted to Eric Rohmer’s delicate tales of erotic negotiation, and Truffaut’s longitudinal study of Jean-Pierre Léaud as Antoine Doinel over five films and twenty years, not to mention Michael Apted’s monumental 7 Up series (now at 56 Up).  This third film in the series ends Before Midnight, after what could definitely be called “A Long Day’s Journey into Night.”  The ferocity of marital argument recalls Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, and Linklater builds upon his own Tape, a no-budget exercise shot in a single motel room with Ethan Hawke and then-wife Uma Thurman. 

Following Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004), with luck we will be looking at Before Noon in 2022.  I won’t recount what actually has happened so far with Jesse and Celine, but I highly, highly recommend that you catch up with their stories.

Looking for more Julie Delpy, I watched 2 Days in New York (2012, MC-62, NFX), which wasn’t as good as her 2 Days in Paris, but no chore to watch.  Chris Rock plays her husband, her crazy French family comes to visit, complications ensue, end of story.  In her own films, she plays a character who is neurotic but not as sharp-edged as Celine.