Before Midnight
★★★★
Dir: Richard Linklater
(2012)
Richard Linklater is certainly a hard-working man. A hard-working man with his true nature reserved for a certain type of the many different types of films he has made. Dazed and Confused, perhaps his most loved, is a pinnacle of high school film making, sweet funny, melancholic even. His mainstream hits, of which School of Rock is perhaps the best, flirted with fears of growing up and failing and last years criminally under rated Bernie was one of the blackest comedies of the year; But of course for most its his fine series of Before films which feels like you're in touch with the real Linklater. Witty, sweet, fearlessly philosophical and filled with complex wordplay.
The third film in the series which began with a fateful impulsive romance between an American guy in Vienna and a lone French girl on a train in Vienna is the most real, sad and bold yet. Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke's Celine and Jessie are together after the wonderful cliffhanger ending of the second film with twin girls of their own. They are on holiday in Greece living in what looks like an idyllic life. The film tellingly begins in an Airport with Jesse dropping off his son after his summer visit. It's handled with a wonderful unspoken complexity and we move on with Jesse out of the terminal to his car and his family. In an unbroken take Delpy and Hawke remind us instantly of the beauty of their characters as they chat about Jesse's heart on sleeve regret at losing his son's youth and his desire to be closer to him.
It's a playful conversation which will fester throughout the film, threatening Delpy's fierce independence and her happiness at a job offer in Paris, into a testing and intelligently acted set piece which forms the final third of the film. Linklater, Delpy and Hawke's philosophical musings rarely result in a single second of dead air and this film is no exception. The script (written by all three of them) crackles and pops with self deprecation and a fine sense of the passing of time in a relationship cursed somewhat by its sparking effervescent romance. The couple must deal with the straight fact that being happy in a long-term relationship with kids built on a fiery affair must settle and mature. This is where the focus of the film lies, in the lines between romance and love.
Nods to Ozu and Woody Allen run rife through all three of the films but Before Midnight owes more of a debt to the former than the latter for the first time. The long uncut takes a pure joy and Hawke and Delpy are incredible as always, balancing the snide remarks towards each other's intense personalities brought on by the fear of each persons future and past before flipping it into a sweet and tender and forgiving love for one another. It is, put simply, one of the finest, most honest pictures of a couple both in love and at odds with themselves in modern cinema and no matter if or when the pair decide to end it, the story of Jesse and Celine is one which I will never get tired of returning to. See you guys in 10 years?
