From exploring possibilities to entertaining repossession in Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, Richard Linklater is bent on de-familiarizing love next. The 2013 sequel Before Midnight destroys the idealistic romance built by its predecessors. And yet simultaneously, the film does piece a romance — one that is made strange by uncomfortable realism but made familiar by maturity.
Before Midnight happens nine years after Jesse (Ethan Hawke) missed his flight to the US; and nearly two decades since he and Celine (Julie Delpy) spent day and night in Vienna. The film is both an introduction to and exposition of the challenging commitment of the married Jesse and Celine. This time, it all happens in Greece.
And it should fittingly so: the geographical setting is heavy with myth and tragedy, almost serving as a visual articulation of Jesse and Celine’s paradoxical marriage. But the Greek Peloponnesian island also functions as a place where their romance takes a dramatic turn and a big leap — a dramatic turn to ugliness, and a big leap towards transcendence.
The aging Jesse and Celine embody superficial ugliness. The lovers are marked with wrinkles, flab, and an overdose of pessimism, markers so far from the Jesse and Celine of the earlier films, who were abundant with youthfulness, flirtation, and audacity.
But ugliness is also actualized thematically through conflict. Love is made to seem synonymous with disagreement. Tension is present, prolonged, and lingering. The spatial and temporal setting become the arena where the couple present their frustrations, ranging from something as personal as jobs to something as selfless as concern for a son.
Both the conflict and realism in their romance are also exemplified by the spaces they occupy. Linklater employs the hotel room well to confine, house and heighten the tension of Jesse and Celine’s arguments. The unromantic wall color (a shade of pale green) and unflattering lighting constitute to an environment absent of love and passion — a contrast to the prevalent, freer spaces of Vienna and Parisian streets of Sunrise and Sunset.
On to matters of de-familiarization: Before Midnight succeeds in transcending the romance constructed by the previous films, a romance that the films’ following have become envious of. Before Midnight shatters the perfection of the love in the past films. Instead, the film displays love — and Jesse and Celine too — in their ugliest angles, and makes its viewers face the realism they have been made to dwell in.
But it is only to that extent, the newfound obsession with marital discord, where the film becomes unfamiliar. Before Midnight still retains its essential quirks: its long-winded conversations, beautiful landscape, sexual jokes, and overwhelming wisdom. Jesse and Celine are still as, if not more, headstrong than ever. But despite being assertive of themselves, the two have reached a mutual sense of maturity, maturity that prioritizes sacrifice and reconciliation of their differences.
Hawke and Delpy still deliver as the lead actor and actress of these films. They have continued to successfully feign spontaneity, and exemplify the wit of both their characters and their utterances. They have managed to balance their roles’ characteristic playfulness and lust with the maturity they acquired nine years into their fictional romance.
Before Midnight has used predominantly de-familiarizing situations. But all of that de-familiarization subscribes to the reiteration of a familiar truth: that romances sans the ugly are those most vulnerable to ephemerality. In an age where love comes and breaks easy, Before Midnight gathers relevance in the hope that it brings: that conflict is not the end of a relationship. In fact, a lasting romance feeds on it.
