The Mirror and the Scene

Jesse and Celine, it's good to be back. 

Before Midnight is the third instalment in Richard Linklater's exceptional and unique series of films which trace the ongoing relationship between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) from the streets of Vienna and Paris to southern Greece and the rupturing unease of parenthood and middle age. It's hard to accept that nearly 20 years have passed since the idyllic young couple met on a train. 

Jesse and Celine are still to an extent the same idealistic young lovers who met on a train and wandered the streets of Vienna and later Paris, but this time they're older, they're wiser and where else could the wisdom and the tragedy and trajectory of theirs and every romance be embodied but in Greece. Their relationship has passed through the youthful phase of dreamy romanticism and although there are moments of the tenderness of the first two films, Before Midnight adds a richer and tougher flavour. It's the transition from innocence to experience.

Richard Linklater has a way of working with real-time scenes like nobody else in cinema today and it has been a theme since his first picture Slacker (1991). Particularly great is a sequence at the beginning of the film where the couple are driving with their two young children from the airport to the Greek villa they've been holidaying at. As with the walking scenes in both Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004) it displays the level of sophistication and fluidity of the dialogue Delpy and Hawke have developed and allows them opportunities to talk more conversationally than perhaps other scenarios would. And because of this their dialogue, their interaction are immediately recognisable as genuine, as something we've all experienced, without any trace of pretence. Again and again in each of the films Linklater has returned to this technique to reveal how the characters are just like us. 

Here is a smart and witty film which tastefully rounds off the series of films which relate the eternal struggle of dualities in relationships and the yearning to retain a newness and innocence through dichotomies (Jesse's melancholy at having partially lost his son to create a new life with Celine) and power struggles, and the yearning for a true communication and understanding. How many couples will watch this set of films and recognise themselves and over and over again, year after year like Jesse and Celine in Before Midnight try and get back to the start again.