Well I think I'll throw the idea of spoilers out the window when talking about The Before Trilogy, Richard Linklater's series following the romance of an American/French couple, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy). Even from the still shot above, you can tell this couple that met for one day in 1995, reunited for one day in 2004, have chosen to be together long-term, as we follow them in this 2013 film.
When we left off at the end of Before Sunset, the middle film in the series, we were in Celine's apartment in Paris and Jesse agreed to miss his flight back to America and back to his wife and son. Fast forward nine years and Celine and Jesse are now a permanent couple with two young daughters, living in Paris but vacationing in Greece.
Where as the first two films were about the connection of young love, the longing, the loss when parting, and the magic of reconnecting with someone you thought you'd never see again, Before Midnight shows us something more mundane and real: life beyond the fairytale romance.
This is the couple, presumably married but not stated, talking about child care and juggling work with family time, and the problems of mid-career, early forty-somethings. Not the glowing sunsets of Paris or twinkling mornings of Vienna, huh?
But we get something deeper here and more middle-aged. The non-glamorous realities of making a relationship work for not just years, but decades. It doesn't hurt that the audience gets to languish in the summer glow of the Greek islands.
Hawke and Delpy, once again, have grown even better as actors and writers in the past decade. The dialogue is smarter and more pointed, and the realism more...realized. The final third of the film takes place between the two of them (after interactions with minor characters in the story for the first two-thirds) in a hotel room. It's a loose, smart, stinging, mean, sobering, and sometimes funny dialogue between a couple at odds with what they want for themselves as a couple and as individuals. It reminded me of some of Cassavetes work with his wife Gena Rowlands onscreen in his own films.
The conclusion of the film is open-ended, once again left on a cliffhanger choice of where they're going as a couple. As this is a trilogy, some may think the series is over. While others think it may pick up again in nine years (that's 2022, if you're counting) with a fourth segment (a quadrilogy film that isn't in the realm of science fiction; rare!)
At that point the leads would be in their early 50s. Where could they be - Paris, their current home; Chicago, where Jesse can be close to his now teenage son from his first marriage? Somewhere else? With someone else?
Are they still together? Separated? Divorced? These are things that Delpy, Hawke, and Linklater need to workshop and hash-out, as they do years before the completed film is released.
The cult is growing though; this film made three times as much as its predecessor, with another Oscar nom for screenplay, and a Golden Globe nom for Delpy as Best Actress.
A journalist asked Hawke in 2014, after the release of Before Midnight, about the continuation of the series. Hawke said:
“The second film was a call, the third film was an answer. I feel that if there were a fourth film, it would be starting a second trilogy, or it would be some new call-and-response.”
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