“How long’s it been since we wandered around, bullshitting?” asks Ethan Hawke in Before Midnight. The answer, for my money, is not bloody long enough. Give it a rest. I don’t want to hear any more from you two.
Hawke’s Jesse and Julie Delpy’s Céline have spent the summer, along with their angelic twin girls and Jesse’s adolescent son from his first marriage, at a writers’ retreat in Greece. It’s been a long time since he and Céline first met on a train circa 1995 and spent a heady Viennese night together. This is the final part of Richard Linklater’s trilogy, and, it turns out, the two fortysomethings are even more irritating than their twentysomething selves.
Eighteen years after their first encounter, Jesse is very much the cool-dad figure, waving his son off at the airport wearing a Neptune Records (so niche, they put out only about 20 records) T-shirt. Céline’s pretty much the same, despite her protestations that she’s middle-aged, has a “fat ass” and is losing her hair.
Their Greek sojourn has been all about sipping wine and stuffing the vine-ripened tomatoes that Céline, in her straw trilby, picked while Jesse chatted about the over-intellectualised novel he’s planning. His plot seems to be little more than a catalogue of disparate characters all linked by having seen On the Waterfront, the 1954 Brando film about union violence. One guy saw it in a film studies class in Paris in 1979, another in a Kazan retrospective in Munich in the 90s. Help.
Jesse is threatening to call his third book Temporary Cast Members of a Long-Running But Little Seen Production of a Play Called Fleeting; he’s reached his equivalent of Belle and Sebastian’s Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant phase. Give me strength.
The film’s plot is sparse – that’s the point – so the dialogue has to be beefy enough to support it. There are plenty of words but, to eke the metaphor out, it’s way more Faliraki Maccy D’s than charcoal-grilled souvlaki. For a film that focuses on conversation, the script – the work of the director and his two stars – is as affected as they come.
The central scene, set around an idyllic Mediterranean lunch table, serves up a buffet of pretentiousness and verbosity. It tries so hard to be natural, yet it’s stylised to the rustic rafters. This is a lunchtime symposium where everyone laughs just enough at just the right moment; everyone has a clever conversational titbit to offer just before there’s a lull; and no one’s having issues with tzatziki dribbling down their chin. In a word, it’s smug.
A young couple, Anna (Ariane Labed) and Achilleas (Yiannis Papadopoulos), are asked about the night they first met. It was the closing-night cast party of the Shakespeare production she’d been starring in (as Perdita in The Winter’s Tale, in case you’re interested) and they rode his motorbike for hours before returning to the theatre, where the acoustics allowed him to whisper something naughty/romantic – it’s left to your imagination – up in the gods that she could hear from the stage. Cue Ariadni (Athina Rachel Tsangari) across the table, ready with her vintage camera to snap the young lovers at this moment of peak schmaltziness. It’s all far too much, like a spread in Elle Decoration with awful audio accompaniment.
There’s talk about Skype and modern love, and about a future in which a computer will write a book better than War and Peace and lab rats will die by giving themselves too many orgasms. Then Céline seizes her moment: “Let me tell you right now, Anna, how to keep a man … let them win … If I didn’t let him win at every game, we would never have sex.” By this point, I’m having to stop myself from screaming at the screen: “Pipe down, Delpy! She didn’t ask for your advice. Stop being so patronising!’
Next up is a story about gender-stereotypical reactions to coming out of a coma. Evidently, the woman’s first reaction is always to ask after others; the man’s is to check his penis is still there. Delpy rouses the rabble: “Penis first, then the rest of the world.” The women around the table break into a chorus of “Penis, penis, penis, penis.” This waxing lyrical on relationships and the differences between men and women is only a few steps away from a Yorkie advert.
At this point, Anna pulls the discourse back to philosophical musing: “Learning all this, I wonder if the idea of love that lasts for ever is still relevant.” Again, help.
After lunch, Delpy and Hawke meander through some ruins, on their way to the hotel their friends have treated them to for the night. This is where their relationship gripes really kick in: he’s now fully domesticated, a semi-successful author living in Paris, while she’s a climate activist, frustrated by career politics. Their idealism has been reined in by the need to worry about logistics and packed lunches. Again, it’s so infuriating – and not helped by the gallingly gentle music.
In the hotel room, they descend into what might once have been a lovers’ tiff but is now an all-out domestic. Again, the script judders and, although some of Jesse’s behaviour does sound vexing, it’s Céline who really gets the blood boiling as she builds this fight into something bigger than the pair of them – this is about all womankind. I give up.
A few lines of dialogue ring true but Before Midnight gives none of the insights into the less loved-up side of long-term love that it promises. It’s impossible to see past all the ham feminism.
It was released to a smattering of five-star reviews (from Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, Anthony Quinn in the Indy and Tim Robey in the Telegraph) but, to my mind, this is the filmic equivalent of dressage – all show, the odd bit of intellectual prancing about, and no substance.
