Picture Credits: IMDb
“Like sunlight, sunset, we appear, we disappear. We are so important to some, but we are just passing through.”
In life, we meet that person who means more to us than any other. The ‘one’ around whom your whole world revolves. While popular media has mostly dealt with finding your perfect match, real life also deals with what happens after you’ve met them.
Does finding the love of your life ensure that you get to love them all your life?
Movie Name - Before Midnight (2013)
Directed by - Richard Linklater
Written by - Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
Starring - Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
Duration - 1h 49min
Genre - Romance, Drama
Language - English
Plot (Spoiler Alert!)
Mimicking the nine-year gap between Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Before Midnight takes place nine years after Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine’s (Julie Delpy) second encounter in Paris.
They are now together and are parents to two twin girls. Jesse is found to be struggling to connect to his son from his first marriage, Hank, who lives with his mother in Chicago after having spent the summer together on the Greek Peloponnese peninsula.
Though Jesse is a well-settled, successful novelist, Celine is at a juncture in her career, contemplating taking a job with the French government. They converse with their friends about love and life over dinner, when they surprise them by having booked a hotel room for Jesse and Celine for a night together.
As the couple reminisces about their first encounter and their times together, they reconsider their relationship wondering if they’d even like each other if they met as strangers now.
As they start getting intimate, Celine gets a call from Hank, who seems to have bonded more with Celine than with Jesse. Jesse wants them to consider moving to Chicago so he could be a better father to Hank, to which Celine replies that doing so would nullify any chance of her having a successful career.
They get into a heated argument where they discuss their fears and seriously doubt their future together, when Celine ends up telling Jesse that she no longer loves him.
As Celine sits alone in the open restaurant of the hotel, Jesse approaches her pretending to be a time traveller bringing her a letter from her 82-year-old self, expressing this night as one of the best of their lives.
Though Celine tries to resist by saying that their fantasies do not converge with reality, Jesse’s proclamation of his love for makes her join in and the two reconcile.
Underlying Themes of Conversation
The true flavor of the film, similar to all the films in the Before Trilogy, is contained in the conversations between Jesse and Celine. With time and age, their topics of conversations have also changed ever-so-slightly, discussing love, life, death, career and sacrifice among many others.
“When I was younger, I just wanted time to speed up. So I could be on my own, be freed from parents and school and all that shit. Now I feel that happened, and I just want everything to slow down.”
Jesse and Celine talk about the irony of being young, wishing you were older and being older wishing you could be young. They criticize the notion of being in a hurry to grow up and enjoying your life every step of the way instead of trying to hurry through to the end,
“People expect women to have this instinct that kicks in like a female baboon. But I had no idea how to do anything.”
Celine does not lose her feminist edge as she ages and becomes a mother. She harshly questions the injustice of gender-specific roles and the expectations of the natural instincts of motherhood. She also deeply disputes how a woman’s sacrifice is assumed to be of second nature to her:
“Women explore for eternity in the vast garden of sacrifice.”
Director’s Inspiration
Richard Linklater was inspired to make the Before Trilogy after meeting a young woman named Amy Lehrhaupt, and spending an evening with her in Philadelphia on his way from New York to Austin. Celine’s character is based on Amy, and Jesse is loosely based on Linklater himself.
In November 2011, Linklater, Hawke and Delpy took to revisiting the characters to formulate a sequel to Before Sunset, mimicking the nine-year gap between the first two films of the trilogy.
Critical Reception
Premiered on 20th January, 2013 at the Sundance Film Festival, similar to Before Sunrise, Before Midnight grossed $23 million with a budget of $3 million, becoming the highest-grossing film in the trilogy.
It received immense critical acclaim, being nominated for the Academy Award and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, among many, many accolades mostly for the excellent screenplay. Julie Delpy was also nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical.
Famous Quotes
“We all get dragged through our parents' lives.”
“The world is fucked by unemotional, rational men deciding shit.”
“But not knowing is not so bad. The point is to be looking, searching, to stay hungry.”
“You remember that guy who loved you and you had that great romance with? It's me.”
“Still there. Still there. Still there. Gone.”
The Bottom Line
The most brilliant yet unsettling thing about this last installment in the Before Trilogy is that we can never tell if Jesse and Celine decided to stay together or part ways.
It won’t be wrong to say that what you believe to have happened after the film, will tell you more about where you stand on the ‘romantic-cynic’ scale!
My Ratings for the movie - 5 on 5
Written By - Kristi Mazumdar
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