Their Big, Fat, Greek Mid-Life Crisis

Before Midnight

**** out of ****

Directed by: Richard Linklater

Starring: Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy

Running time: 108 minutes

Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy has aged as gracefully as a fine wine: delightful at first sip, more textured when tried in later stages, and always intoxicating.

Before Sunrise, released in 1995, took place over the course of an evening, chronicling the first night of a kindling relationship between an American man, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), and a French woman, Celine (Julie Delpy). After meeting on a train destined for Paris, the two get off in Vienna, stroll the avenues, talk, play pinball, talk some more and fall for each other before heading off on their separate ways the next morning.

Jesse and Celine reconvened in Before Sunset, released in 2004, for a shorter, more urgent catch-up session. During a European tour of Jesse’s book – about, of all things, a chance encounter over one night with an exotic lady – Celine showed up to the reading in Paris. Although he is married with a son in America and she has a steady boyfriend, the two remain smitten with each other.

Nine years later, in the latest dialogue-rich snapshot of their romance, the optimism that once existed between Jesse and Celine has diminished. The two are now husband and wife, living in Paris but vacationing in the Southern Peloponnese with their twin girls, who were born shortly after the events in Sunset.

In Before Midnight, the duo only spend two thirds of the screen time alone. In the middle, there is an extended dinner, a jovial affair with three other couples at different stages of their romantic trajectory. A young adult pair talks about maintaining the bliss of their love through Skype – which another at the table dubs ‘the new romance’ – while the older couples lovingly reminisce about how they met.

Jesse and Celine remember the fleeting adoration they once had and cannot help but smile when recounting the journey of their first encounter. However, sitting at the table, they rarely look at each other, invested more into others' perception of love and relationships than in fulfilling their own.

The couple met in Sunrise on a train after Celine moved from her seat, annoyed by a bickering German couple in her row, to one across from Jesse. Jesse explained on the train that when couples get older, their hollering at each other becomes more intolerable because the husband and wife lose the ability to hear each other.

In this film, that perpetual excitement the two shared in previous entries is replaced by that same hostility the German couple had. It’s no coincidence that Before Midnight takes place in the land where tragedy was invented.

Both actors contributed to the screenplay with director Richard Linklater, infusing the characters with clever ways to bridge nine years between the stories while keeping the dramatic tension palpable and moving forward.

Jesse’s bestseller about his one night with Celine, entitled This Time, now has two sequels on the shelf. He tells a cohort of friends that he is thinking of penning a dark comedy from various perspectives – of a man with a perpetual sense of déjà vu, of one constantly thinking of death, and one with an inability to connect to anyone. He doesn’t quite realize how he is also describing himself.

Meanwhile, Celine feels undermined by her husband’s success and ability to wring whatever he wants from his life without letting her have a say. Peeved about his lack of support for her upcoming job, Celine tests him and wants to admit his mistakes and lack of foresight. When a hotel clerk asks her to sign a copy of Jesse’s book, Celine inks the page in disgust, unimpressed that she is best known as a figment of her husband’s imagination.

Before Midnight catapults into a searing two-person scene in a hotel suite that lasts for nearly 30 minutes, as husband and wife move from aching sexual intimacy to disqualifying their love for each other in a gripping tug-of-war. Linklater films the scene masterfully, letting the camera framing personify the distance between the characters as they move together and apart.

Hawke and Delpy are also terrific, affecting and stingingly funny. Both characters have weathered much – well, each other – through nine years and showcase a chemistry through the crippling verbal blows they throw at each other that any other screen couple would envy matching. 

Through 18 years, Linklater’s trilogy has been something of a miracle: a truthful, tempestuous journey through the changing seasons of romantic love, heightened through a  marriage of nuanced, naturalistic performances and insightful dialogue-driven scenes.

Whether or not Linklater, Hawke and Delpy reconvene in nine years (or 18, 27…), Before Midnight will endure as the riveting, blistering mid-life crisis chapter within an already exceptional collection of stories.