Before Midnight
Richard Linklater (2013)
In the latest (and otherwise unwanted) complimentary issue of the New Statesman to arrive, Ryan Gilbey’s review of Before Midnight is very candid about the personal importance of what is now a trilogy, and how events in these films by Richard Linklater intersect with Gilbey’s own experience of relationships beginning, producing kids and ending. David Denby compares Before Midnight with the Seven Up television documentaries – ‘heartbreaking as a record of the progress toward death’. Before Midnight certainly got to me but for different reasons, although I did feel something akin to what I felt watching the most recent Michael Apted film – 56 Up: a vague depression – caused not by a sense of the proximity of death but by a realisation that the lives being described might now be unlikely to change or develop much in the future. Richard Linklater and his leads, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke, seem to want to suggest that too (as with Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the three of them co-wrote the script). In fact, the settledness of Céline and Jesse is hardly comparable with that of some of the superficially more prosaic lives in 56 Up. Linklater’s couple (I took it they weren’t married) have young children and interesting jobs even if Céline feels professionally thwarted, at least compared with the successful novelist that Jesse has continued to be. But their lives are in relative stasis after their whirling encounters in the two previous films.
My memory may deceive me but I recall the camera in Sunrise and Sunset moving quickly around in Vienna and Paris. The shifting locations chimed with the snatched, urgent meetings between Céline and Jesse – at least until the action came to rest, and Before Sunset ended, in her apartment in Paris and uncertainty about whether or not he was going to leave to catch his plane back to America. After a flight is caught at the start of Before Midnight – with Jesse seeing off his now teenage son (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick), who’s returning to his mother in Chicago, via London – most of the movie comprises long sequences in more or less static situations. First, there’s a car drive back from Kalamata airport to the villa on the Peloponnese coast where Céline and Jesse and their twin daughters are holidaying (this sequence is a single shot). Next it’s dinner with their host (played by the famous cinematographer Walter Lassally, making his acting debut at the age of eighty-six) and his other guests. Then a walk to the posh hotel – a one-night stay there is a present to Céline and Jesse from their friends from the villa – and an argument in their room.
In Sunrise and Sunset there was a rationale to the torrential conversation between Céline and Jesse: they had a lot to say to each other and limited time in which to say it. It’s not the same here – in spite of plenty of words about the passage of time and mortality, there feels like too much time for talk. (When death does occur – Jesse gets a phone message that his much-loved grandmother has died – it has remarkably little impact on his mood and chatter.) What’s more, the couple’s exhausting articulacy is the same in each situation. Much of the dialogue is clever – and seems shrewder when we learn that, according to Jesse anyway, Céline spends hours each day whining and bitching. You get the retrospective sense that the couple keep up the joshing to keep down evidence of the rifts between them. This is how they eventually recover from their big falling out, in a final reconciliation that’s alarmingly fragile. In other respects, though, the climactic row is unconvincing: in my experience of these things anyway, the combatants get to know their techniques and to exploit them. One or both of Jesse and Céline would surely resort to, say, silence or laconic name-calling so as to deny the other scope for building up verbal momentum.
To be honest (and I’m finding this increasingly), there were other elements of Before Midnight that saddened me not because of the piercing, beautiful transience of what Linklater was showing but because the characters were simply in situations or doing things that lower my spirits: being in an airport; the prospect of Céline and Jesse stopping their car to look at ancient ruins (I was relieved they took advantage of their daughters’ slumbers, in the back of the car, to chicken out); going to a supermarket in a foreign country; the dinner conversation about sex; and the relentless verbal facility itself. The silence in the hotel room at one point in their big argument is such a relief – but this is transient: it’s soon broken by Ethan Hawke’s sighs and the intervention of Graham Reynolds’ heartstring-plucking score. The film naturally relies to some extent on the audience’s familiarity with the characters (it’s likely that a high proportion of viewers of the two previous films will come back for more). Hawke and Julie Delpy know these characters so well by now that they’re perhaps too easy in the roles – perhaps assume they must be playing them right: I think Hawke overacts occasionally, particularly in the opening scene when Jesse’s saying goodbye to his son. The tensions in the relationship are prepared for in Before Midnight in a way that made me nostalgic not for the passing of time but for the superiority of the film’s predecessors. By the end, I’m not sure that I wanted Céline and Jesse to break up but I longed for them to shut up.
3 July 2013