Before Midnight
In 2022, we’ll look forward to the release of “Before Noon”, in which Jesse and Céline are divorced, the girls are auditioning for the St. Petersburg Conservatory which both of them attend. The audition starts in the afternoon, so Jesse and Céline decide to spend the morning together, go brunching and walk through the city. Obviously they still have feelings for each other and discuss love and friendship after it’s over yadda yadda. Actually I am strongly imagining this part of the “Before” series to be much like the last episode of “Scenes from a Marriage”, but it just doesn’t seem to work. While Johan and Marianne are made for each other and were faithful to each other in their own strange way, I just can’t see Jesse and Céline do it. Those two have never technically been faithful and their relationship almost exclusively survives on this special sparkle that re-appears every 9 years. Perhaps this is just me, but their relationship is definitely one of those that had an intense start and then simply deteriorated. For Johan and Marianne we never saw the start, and I’d say that their feelings for each other have always stayed the same throughout the entire film. It’s just that it took a divorce for them to realize that being divorced is essentially the marriage that was right for them. (Was that confusing?)
“Before Midnight” reminded me much more of “Viaggio in Italia” in which the main characters fight throughout the entire film and then got back together almost with a deus ex machina. For “Viaggio in Italia”, this miraculous rekindling of their relationship was rather destructive to the movie, and I was disappointed. Perhaps I am reading too much into “Before Midnight”, but I think the end has to be understood with the other films in mind – we know a little more about Jesse and Céline now, and their relationship has always been make-believe. In fact my favorite scene with them is the one where Jesse and Céline “call” their respective friends at home telling them about their little Viennese love experience. This kind of role-play which the two of them can do almost naturally might be the key to why they reconciled in the end. They may not have resolved any of their problems and it looks like they might never, judging by how much both of them believe in gender clichés, but something in their relationship works. They are able to take a step back from their real-life troubles and laugh at them, even if it’s only for a moment. Instead of lying to themselves, however, this is a moment of truth, where Céline is able to forget her frustration for just one second and accept the fact that Jesse ultimately loves her. (Strange, as it may sound, since he wants to force her to live in Chicago with him.)
I have a million things to say about the movie – Julie Delpy seems to really hate her boyfriends’s ex-girlfriends, I think Jesse and Céline should never talk to other people (it just makes their prejudices come out too much), the hotel room is almost as crappy as the one in Blue Valentine etc. etc. – but I shall refrain, or keep that for later. In essence, this is a movie that plays right into my fangirlism for the “Before” series, and follows my life along almost perfectly from playful young girl to disillusioned lover to mother and wife. You cannot believe how often Pip said “This is just like us!”, and honestly, it made me uncomfortable. It was exactly what I expected from the film (which is an amazing feat) but I am not sure whether I like that. Watch it.
The hail of bullets:
- Fiction is great, but considering how many relationship stories there are out there, only few come to mind where I think “they say the same things as I do”: Scenes from a marriage, Schnitzler’s plays, the Before series. I think that’s it.
- Honestly, I wonder whether men think about their male genital before everything else. If I had the choice between a beloved person dying and never being able to have sex – obviously I’d rather sacrifice sex.
- The movie does look like everybody involved had a lot of fun. When I described the next Before film from my wishful thinking mind, I was surprised how easy it was to come up with it. I think it is because it’s so easy to think about a story I know a lot about – one which is essentially the same as life. With that said, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy must have had some sort of romance before.
- I think the Before series would be so much better if it had less gender-specific jokes and clichés. Maybe these are unavoidable in a relationship film, but I would prefer them to be more subtle then – just like in real life.
- My favorite scene in the film was role-playing at the end. It’s also the very reason why I like “In the Mood for Love” so much. Playing make-believe is about my favorite thing in the world and I look forward to doing that with O.