Before Mid­night

Mon­i­tor­ing the real-time adven­tures of ultra-loqua­cious love­birds Celine (Julie Delpy) and Jesse (Ethan Hawke) can some­times be an unnerv­ing busi­ness. So inti­mate are we with their com­bustible on/​off romance on the back of 1995’s Before Sun­rise and 2004’s Before Sun­set, that revis­it­ing them now as a mar­ried cou­ple can only mean one thing: trouble’s a brewin’.

With­out spoil­ing any of the film’s whim­si­cal­ly artic­u­late machi­na­tions, the minute-by-minute process of watch­ing this third instal­ment – espe­cial­ly if you’re a fan of the first two – makes for knife-edge view­ing. Celine even at one point fears that Jesse may have some life-threat­en­ing ill­ness after he omi­nous­ly admits he’s got some­thing he wants to tell her. For a moment, it’s devastating.

The pair are spend­ing the sum­mer sea­son idling on the Pelo­pon­nese penin­su­la with their two tou­sle-haired (though sur­pris­ing­ly mute) twin daugh­ters. The ancient ruins that lit­ter the land­scape act as a con­stant reminder of the pass­ing of time and that the unmedi­at­ed pas­sions of youth must now make way for fam­i­ly oblig­a­tions and respon­si­bil­i­ties. Richard Lin­klater demar­cates the emo­tions via the light in the sky: with the sun comes humour and sar­casm and sex talk; with the moon comes bit­ter­ness and frus­tra­tion. And more sex talk.

As much as Before Mid­night impress­es as a kind of caus­tic bour­geois soap opera, it’s the cadence, inflec­tion, into­na­tion, rhythm and tone of words that are the film’s fore­most plea­sures. Delpy and Hawke have not mere­ly learned their lines and barked them at one anoth­er, but have devel­oped an elab­o­rate cat­a­logue of ges­tic­u­la­tions and voic­es that blur the line between what is being said and what is being meant. Even though one sus­pects the char­ac­ters of Jesse and Celine are just sim­ple exten­sions of Hawke and Delpy, this feel­ing is nev­er enough to shat­ter the illu­sion that the peo­ple we’re spend­ing time with are impos­si­bly frag­ile and sen­si­tive and that their rela­tion­ship runs deep­er than the fic­tion of the film’s world.

What’s also great about Before Mid­night is that it nev­er strays into the aca­d­e­m­ic. Lin­klater, Delpy and Hawke have writ­ten the film in such a fas­tid­i­ous­ly loose way as to make the chal­lenge of attach­ing a sin­gle umbrel­la mean­ing to all the walk-and-talk entire­ly futile.

This isn’t a cold study in behav­iour­al dynam­ics, but a warm, mean­der­ing col­lec­tion of seman­tic odds and ends. It’s not about the dif­fi­cul­ty of deal­ing with big prob­lems, it’s about the ever-widen­ing chasm between romance and mutu­al com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. It also deals with the depress­ing idea that it’s only when two peo­ple are tru­ly in love that they are able to offload their most jagged barbs.

If there’s a prob­lem with the film, it’s that it ends up only being about what it’s about. While we can hap­pi­ly read into the myr­i­ad nuances of Celine and Jesse’s inter­ac­tions while see­ing our own rela­tion­ships refract­ed in their glo­ri­ous­ly cir­cuitous bick­er ses­sions, the film lacks the play­ful cin­e­mat­ic dimen­sion of Abbas Kiarostami’s Cer­ti­fied Copy or the sub­lime mir­a­cles of Rober­to Rossellini’s Jour­ney To Italy (from which this lov­ing­ly cribs).

Polit­i­cal­ly, though, it’s on far stur­dier ground, con­tain­ing as it does per­haps the most per­cep­tive and tren­chant dis­cus­sion of how child­birth can pre­vent women from attain­ing the same pro­fes­sion­al sat­is­fac­tion as men. Indeed, with this film, Lin­klater proves him­self to be one of the great­est liv­ing sculpters of screen dialogue.