Before Midnight Review

20th Jun 2013

Eighteen years have passed since that fateful night when young Ethan Hawke sidetracked Julie Delpy from her journey to Vienna. We fell in love with both of them on that moonlit night, and as they both went their separate ways at dawn, we hoped and prayed that fate would reunite them. Nine years later, it did. And with their salad days behind them, Celine and Jesse found themselves no less in love, but far more restricted by all those adult trappings and responsibilities; careers, a family, living on separate continents. Oh my, how my heart stood still during the final moments of Before Sunset… And now, in 2013, having missed the plane nine years ago, Jesse and Celine are trundling along the comfortable road of cohabitation security. They have two beautiful twin girls (conceived mere seconds after Before Sunset finished, so we learn), Jesse has achieved global success after publishing books about how he and Celine met and fell in love, and they are nearing the end of a heavenly summer holiday spent frolicking about the Greek countryside (and making Greek Salad).

Well, needless to say, you’d not stand to gain much from watching Before Midnight unless you’ve seen its two prequels. The Before… trilogy has to be one of the most beautifully told love sagas since ancient Greece, because although it is almost akin to a fairytale in its progression, it is played out with such humanity and reality that we can’t help but feel like the third corner of the love triangle.

So how wonderful to see the star-crossed lovers so happily together, clearly so very in love, so familiarly likable and so reassuringly normal. I can see so many instances of my own relationships in the scatty conversation they have whilst driving along a clear motorway, twins asleep in the back seat. Arriving back at the villa where they’ve been staying, we meet the assortment of characters they’ve spent their summer with, all there to give us their own take on love. For this is Celine and Jesse’s film through and through; the characters they talk with at the beginning of the film serve only to get us thinking about love; its fickle, even capricious nature; how it can hold a person forever, and how realizing that it has left you without your noticing can be the most heartbreaking thing of all.

Over a vivacious dinner, chinks begin to show in the solidity of Celine and Jesse’s love, and we are dealt the devastating hand that perhaps they are just a normal couple after all, and not the eternal lovers that I, for one, had considered them to be. But all is well as they set out on a romantic night out together, ambling through the Greek countryside debating which of them should die first, whether they would still love each other at ninety-six and talking all the usual rubbish which seems so glib on paper but which has such great meaning in practise.

Once they are alone, the course of the film resembles a heart-rate monitor of someone who’s just been revived after suffering a severe cardiac arrest. From gentle tiffing, the conversation escalates to the dramatic, the superlative and the plain absurd. I had no idea whose side I was on; only that I was desperate, as were they, that the couple sort it out and be in love again. If there’s any hope for us real life folk, surely it must start with Celine and Jesse, the couple who have seen us through the past two decades, with all their ups and downs and mishaps, never letting go of the irrational sentiment that love conquers all. True to form, Before Midnight has an ambiguous ending, and much to my frustration we are never told the time. It’s a Cinderella story, really: the magic breaks at midnight and after that, if there is not love left between them then there is nothing.

As you can tell from my waffling, this film had me thinking for days and days after it finished about the nature of love, and people and all sorts of lofty things which all the terrible rom-coms in the world would have us believe couldn’t possibly be relayed via the silver screen. But Before Midnight is the one of the most successful instances of art imitating life I’ve ever come across, and whilst on a basic level it is a thoroughly entertaining watch, with an open mind and an open heart it is one of those films which has stayed with me, and offered me a little bit of hope when I’ve needed it in my own life.