It's wonderful to know that a movie about two people bullshitting for ninety-odd minutes can matter, and even make a tidy profit. And to see three such movies now over 18 years with the same two people bullshitting and still mattering? That's inspiring.
Richard Linklater's third and probably final installment in the lives of Jesse and Celine, Before Midnight, gives us a pair of grown-ups struggling with real-world problems and still managing to address the more abstract, existentialist issues that their younger selves talked about in 1995's Before Sunrise. In the first film, Jesse and Celine meet on a train coming to Vienna, and he persuades her to spend the day and night with him before his plane leaves for the States the next day. They do, and have a fascinating, romantic conversation all through the streets of the city, meeting a few oddball characters. In the second film, 2004's Before Sunset, Jesse is in Paris at a book signing, having written his novel about that night in Vienna, and Celine goes to find him. They spend the rest of the film talking about their lives since then, but where the first film ends with a romantic promise to meet again (a promise that was not kept, though one of them had a good excuse, a death in the family), this one simply ends with the two of them back at Celine's apartment, and Jesse apparently going to miss his plane back to New York, where he lives with his wife and son.
And now, it's nine years later, and we see Jesse putting his teenaged son on a plane from Greece back to the States. It's turned out that Jesse did stay with Celine, and that they have twin daughters (though they have not married). Jesse and his wife got a very bitter and angry divorce, and she and their son live in Chicago, with the boy spending summers in Europe with Jesse and Celine. In this goodbye at the airport, the kid seems pretty level-headed, considering, and Jesse is obviously wracked with guilt at how all this has played out for him. His worries about his son trigger much of the intense conversation that the film gives us between this couple, now in their early forties.
Unlike the first two films, which really only give us the two lovers, Before Midnight gives us a middle scene with a few other characters who also talk about the meanings of life and love. The couple and their children have been in Greece for six weeks as part of an opportunity for Jesse to write at the house of an older, prestigious author, and his friends and family all share in the experience. Here we find out about what happened immediately after Jesse missed the plane, and yes, he's written a sequel to his first book about that day and night. The inclusion of these scenes makes sense, as they show an intimacy and friendship that shows different generations' ideas on love and life's meaning. But it also gives us a contrast to the real struggles of Jesse and Celine's relationship.
They walk through the town on their way to a hotel, a gift from their Greek hosts on their last night, so that can have a night alone while they watch their daughters. But a call from Jesse's son to Celine interrupts their intimacy, and leads to an extensive argument about their relationship, each one pointing fingers at the other, complaining about the sacrifices they have made for the other one, and hurting each other at almost every word. This fight has been long in coming -- during the drive from the airport, each has talked about changes in their lives, Jesse considering moving to the States to be with his son, Celine thinking about taking a government job instead of struggling to make a difference at a nonprofit group, and each seemingly talking at cross-purposes -- but it explodes in that hotel room. The long conversation during the long walk to the hotel has captured some of the wistfulness of their travel through Vienna in the first film, as they contemplate life at forty and how different it is than at 20. You only have a few years of really having your own life, Jesse says, from the time you first leave your parents' house to the time you have kids.
And yep, that's about right. And since we (me, my wife, people of our generation who have grown up with these two) have cared so much about Jesse and Celine to follow their lives on screen for nearly twenty years, we flinch when they fight, because we recognize so much of what they are saying. The Times noted that recent films are showing how much work it is to maintain marriage. (Coincidence that such films are coming out amid the changes regarding marriage laws and sexuality?) It sure as shit is. And all those crazy dreams we have when we are young are hard to fathom when you've got to figure out who picks up the kids at school, when you get quizzed on the name of their pediatrician (and yes, I bet almost every woman knows it, and very few guys do), when you realize you have not an adult conversation in years.
Of course, Jesse and Celine's circumstances are still exaggerated for the screen, but they are not far-fetched. That's because Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, who coscripted the film with Linklater, as they did with Before Sunset, are so terrific together again. They know these two very well, and their conversations, no matter how intense, always seem real. Linklater also gives us a feel for the Greek settings with some fine steadicam work through the landscapes of country and town. And the secondary characters are perfectly placed and well-acted by an international cast. But the heart of the film, as it has always been, is the relationship between Jesse and Celine, how interesting they are to each other, how much they love each other, and how much we are interested in them. The film ends somewhat ambiguously, and that's probably about right for them. Let's face it, this is hard shit. Yet I hope this is the last film about them. Can these three talents pull it off one more time? I don't know.
In thinking about Jesse and Celine, I'm reminded of two songs of the same title, "Tunnel of Love." Dire Straits' 1980 song is a youthful memory, of two young lovers who meet at a seaside amusement park, spend the day/night, and part in an ultra-romantic manner:
she took off her silver locket,
and said remember me by this,
she put her hand in my hip pocket
I got a keepsake and a kiss
very romantic, very lush, especially aided by the sweeping keyboard work of E. Street Band's Roy Bittan. (Springsteen's egineer on Born To Run, Jimmy Iovine, was the producer of the Dire Straits album Making Movies, whose first song is "Tunnel of Love.")
And speaking of Springsteen, "Tunnel of Love" is the title track to his 1987 follow-up to the blockbuster Born in the U.S.A. A modest hit considering the success of the previous album, the song gives us some seeming cliches about the funhouse rides, and it seems like he must be speaking in metaphor throughout. But the last verse really tells it like it is, for the older Jesse and Celine, and for us:
Well it oughta be easy, oughta be simple enough:
man meets woman and they fall in love, but the
house is haunted and the ride gets rough
you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above
That's pretty much what we're all doing, trying to live with the baggage, the stress, and the shit that we can't rise above.
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