Before Midnight – Film Review
Director: Richard Linklater
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
Release Date: June 21st
This Friday June 21st marks the longest day of the year, and is perhaps a fitting release date for a film which gets more done Before Midnight in one day (or to be pedantic, 109 minutes) than most of us manage all week, solstice or not.
The third part of writer/director Richard Linklater’s low-key indie trilogy, the highly-anticipated Before Midnight follows Before Sunrise from 1995 and its 2004 sequel Before Sunset. While this latest instalment can and does stand alone as a romantic comedy-drama following a middle-aged couple, viewing of the previous movies is definitely recommended, if not wholly necessary, to fully appreciate the way in which this eighteen-year relationship has evolved on film.
Continuing the series’ trend of catching up with leads Jesse (Hawke) and Céline (Delpy) every nine years in a beautiful part of Europe, Before Midnight finds the couple, now the parents of seven-year-old twin girls, vacationing in Greece. Unfolding over the course of a day, the film follows the couple’s attempts to balance the physical and emotional intimacy of their relationship with their responsibilities as guests, workers, parents and ultimately, their individual selves.
Before Midnight asks what happens when a brief, romantic (and romanticised) love affair like Jesse and Céline’s develops into a long-term, committed relationship with responsibilities and emotional baggage. Issues around jobs, living arrangements, ex-wives and children which aren’t relevant during the few hours of a time-constrained fling become serious causes of contention in this film. Fans of the franchise will be keen to see how its protagonists deal with the realities of middle-aged life, having seen them as younger, more carefree characters, while newbies will doubtless still appreciate the film’s easy handling of difficult issues.
Before Midnight has a larger or at least more prominent supporting cast than previous installments, featuring cherubic and precocious children, charming Greek couples at different stages of romance, and the philosophical ex-pat writer with whom the family is staying. Yet this is still very much a film about its central couple and the continually-shifting dynamic of their relationship, best exemplified when Jesse and Cline alternately flirt and argue at a casual dinner party. Hawke and Delpy make a meal of this scene, no pun intended, Linklater fully capitalizing on the chemistry between his two leads to present a relationship fully believable on every visible level. Hawke hasn’t been this good on-screen for years – although considering his output, who’d have known if he was? – while Delpy continues to complement his projection of a ‘closet macho’ American teenager with her passionate but contemplative portrayal of Céline.
Technically, this is elegant, yet unpretentious film-making. The movie features only a handful of scenes and locations, complementing its sparsely-plotted but character-rich storytelling rather than distract from it. The Mediterranean locales are lushly shot by Linklater and cinematographer Christos Voudouris, but feature only fleetingly in Before Midnight, most scenes framed instead within the banal confines of cars, kitchens and hotel rooms. This is no doubt to induce a sense of claustrophobia, signalling thematically the change in Jesse and Céline ’s spontaneous open-air romance from the first two movies to a more tightly-contained domestic arrangement, and is further evidence of Linklater’s modest mastery of this kind of film.
While the film is frequently poignant, philosophical and unflinchingly honest,it may also be the funniest in the series. The humour arises not only from in-jokes like Jesse’s follow-up to his novel ‘This Time’ being called ‘That Time,’ but from the long-take, meandering conversations between the couple in the car, at the ruins, or their discussions and practices of child-rearing; Jesse’s frustration that his US-based son can’t throw a baseball, or greedy consumption of his sleeping daughter’s leftover apple are the kind of observational quirks that Judd Apatow clearly longed to nail with This is 40 while repeatedly missing the mark.
Indeed, if it weren’t for the marketing confusion it’d cause, This is 41 wouldn’t be a bad title for this film. Yet Before Midnight, while remaining consistent with the previous installments of the series, offers too a perfect metaphorical representation of where we find our characters – still in early middle-age, well before the midnight of their lives, while still acknowledging the darkness creeping in around them of conflicting responsibilities, shifting emotional intimacy, and uncertain futures.
Before Midnight is a remarkable film on many levels, not least that it succeeds in being equally good as its predecessors at presenting a relationship, born of walking and talking, and cemented in the spaces in between. It would have been all too easy to predict these talkative, philosophical vagabonds transitioning badly into adulthood, Generation X becoming Generation ‘Why?’ and ‘Zzzz’, yet the trio of Hawke, Delpy, and director Linklater, who all share credit for writing this film, only make its central characters more interesting with age.
Before Midnight is a refreshingly unpatronising, laid-back romantic drama, with another delightful tease of an ending that has me on the edge of my seat for summer 2022.
Score: 5/5
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