'Before Midnight,' Love Darkens And Deepens
In the 1995 Richard Linklater film, Before Sunrise, a young American man named Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and a young Frenchwoman named Celine (Julie Delpy) meet on a train from Budapest. Intrigued by one another, they get off the train together in Vienna and spend the night wandering the city, talking and falling in love, before they both return to their respective lives in their respective countries.
They are reunited in the 2004 film Before Sunset when Jesse, who has come to Paris to promote his best-selling novel based on the night he spent with Celine in Vienna, spots Celine at a reading, and the two again spend time together walking and talking. At the end of the film the audience is left wondering whether they'll leave their partners (to whom they are both unhappily attached) and couple up with each other.
In Linklater's latest look at Jesse and Celine, Before Midnight, we get an answer to that question: They do. And it's no fairy tale. The film catches the couple at a tense moment in their relationship, as the daily grind of life gets in the way of intimacy and communication. The script for this film — as well as for the other two — is a collaborative effort among Linklater, Hawke and Delpy, and Hawke says that, when it comes to the idea of love, Before Midnight looks at a different side of it than the earlier movies examined.
“ We needed to try to address the harder, more difficult aspects of daily life and what it means when you get what you want, and what you do with what you want when you have it, and do you still want it?