Before Midnight

In 1995’s Before Sunrise, Richard Linklater cast Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy as two smug but intelligent 20-somethings who met on a train and spent a magical evening walking around Vienna before saying goodbye. The characters, Jesse and Celine, reconnected in 2004’s Before Sunset, a remarkable film that countered Sunrise‘s focus on the intoxicating nature of possibility with a meditation on regret and paths not taken. This time, the characters walked around Paris, but the film ended on Jesse not leaving — skipping his plane home to his wife and child, staying with Celine. It was a more cynical and more romantic film than its predecessor.

Now, in Before Midnight, Celine and Jesse are essentially (if not technically) married, with twin daughters. This time, their walk occurs in a small Greek town where an idyllic summer is winding down. Jesse regrets that he’s not around to be a better father to the son from his broken first marriage; meanwhile, Celine has been offered a dream job in France.

The film finds its groove, as Celine and Jesse finally find themselves alone, and their dialogue settles into a dance between the tender and the vicious, with a noticeable bend toward the latter. The surprise isn’t so much how imperfect that life is but rather how ordinary it is — and how such ordinariness breeds contempt. The question becomes whether a relationship, to survive, needs to maintain the illusions that it was founded on. We see the desperation in the face of the character who needs the illusion to continue, and the wariness in the face of the one who holds the power to continue or shatter it. As with Sunrise and Sunset, Midnight‘s very final moment is both beautiful and more ambiguous than it might first seem. This time, however, the possibilities that it holds are potentially more poisonous than intoxicating.