Before Midnight is the third in a Richard Linklater trilogy, which focuses on a couple, Celine and Jesse, played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. They have gone from strangers to married with children under our watchful eye. We have gone from asking will they get together to will they stay together. I have no idea if there will be future installments, but considering that the target audience and the characters have grown together, I know that I’ll always be willing to watch it, I’m just not sure how or when.
I saw the initial movie, Before Sunrise, in theaters though I do not remember if I received a ticket for free or purchased one. I think that the poster for this movie is still rolled up somewhere around my house, possibly in the room that I am writing in. I saw the second movie, Before Sunset, at home and streaming, but it failed to make as much of an impact as the first. My main memory was that I was distinctly less eager for them to get together. It was a fantasy that could not hold up to the harsh light of daily routine and proximity. It is easy to be the love of someone’s life for twenty-four hours, but to be the soul mate of the person who forgot to wash the dishes is another story. Before Midnight determines whether or not my assessment of their fictional relationship was accurate.
Before Midnight shows the couple on vacation on the Greek Peloponnese peninsula. The rhythm of the movie is to show them as individuals interacting with others then together as a unit interacting with people, and as individuals interacting with each other creating that unit for each other and others. While the dialogue feels improvised, and the action feels spontaneous, it was actually scripted and rehearsed. Relationships are kind of like movies in this way. They feel organic, but they are dense community collaborations that need a lot of work and negotiation to successfully move forward. As outsiders, we get pleasure believing that we are sneaking an intimate peak into someone’s life, but the subjects know that they are being observed even if it is only the couple observing themselves so they put on a show. The trick is to not suddenly decide to go solo.
Before Midnight shows before it tells. Jesse casually suggests something that completely throws the relationship out of orbit and has the implicit feel of an ultimatum without the actual words, which throws Celine off balance. Is she being asked to choose the life of the couple over herself because half the couple decides something unilaterally? How do you make decisions if there is no one to break the tie? Once they separate after this conversation, Linklater shows them in gendered spaces. Celine is in the kitchen preparing the meal with the other women while Jesse is talking with the men outside about writing, i.e. their work. It is revealed that Celine didn’t want to go on this vacation, but she is enjoying it. She feels herself losing traction, and Jesse does not see a problem because if everyone is having a good time, then there should not be any conflict. It is so easy to slip into these well-worn roles because the tracks have existed long before anyone on them existed. He doesn’t see them or doesn’t believe that they are on them because they aren’t always on them, but she knows that they are easy patterns to fall into.
Before Midnight is a dialogue heavy movie, and my favorite one appears near the end of the movie during a conversation with Celine and Jesse. Celine rants, “Here we go. Unemotional, rational. You always play the part of the one and only rational one, and I’m the irrational, hysterical, hormone crazy one because I have emotions. You sit back and speak from your big perspective, which means everything you say is level headed and pure. The world is fucked by unemotional, rational men deciding shit. Politicians going to war. Corporate heads deciding to wreck the environment.” Yes, it is a tad dramatic and overblown, but relationships make the world go round so the importance of challenging the dynamic of her relationship is not only symptomatic of a larger problem, it is also a building block in the larger problem.
Jesse just sees Greece as a lovely place that he enjoys, but Celine sees the unrest behind the feta. She is concerned that society is going to collapse, and if it does, Jesse will be genuinely surprised. Maybe the trilogy was always a political work, but Before Midnight is explicitly so. The health of a relationship and the world relies on a lot of invisible work and compromise, but until one examines and challenges the assumptions of their dynamic, there is also a lot of frustration and resentment for what appears to be ingratitude or entitlement, but actually discomfort.
Before Midnight does not depict Jesse as a Neanderthal. He says that he loves hearing Celine think, which is what attracted him to her, but from the opening scene, he is someone who is impulsive/spontaneous and even when warned about the consequence, pretends not to care, then when confronted by them, sheepishly flounders for cover. When confronted by her, he responds with outrage and verbally lashes out at her allegations of oppression because he is not like the people that she complains about, which is true and not true. He loves to hear her think, but reacts negatively when he actually has to respond to her thoughts. It does not occur to him how the salad gets made. It just appears. When Celine actually breaks down with him why he made this ultimatum, it becomes obvious that he is acting emotionally and just wants things to work out without being uncomfortable or actually solving the underlying problem. If he does not see the problem or discuss it, he can pretend it does not exist.
Before Midnight may be my favorite in the trilogy. Once I know that there will be no future installments, I would love to sit down and watch Linklater’s trilogy in one sitting. It is a breakdown of how the personal is political, and how the logistics of daily life make us unthinkingly fall into patterns that can be unintentionally oppressive and harmful to the life that we want to enjoy and preserve. I wish that more couples would have these explicit, difficult conversations about the invisible labor that makes the world function, but as shown in this film, it is incredibly difficult to disagree without hurting each other however this skill needs to be honed and developed to move forward for the health of the couple, the family and society. (For an example of how a healthy couple functions, listen to The Black Guy Who Tips, which is intended for mature audiences.)