In 1995, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater began what would be a 18 year project, spanning three countries, three films, and influencing countless young romantics with a taste for introspection and a fondness of talking about it. Jesse is your typical young American, full of ideas and brimming with bravado, Celine is a flighty Parisian student, a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl with a melancholy twist. They meet on a train, engage in pseudo-philosophical verbal acrobatics and spend a day and a night getting lost in Vienna. Their meet-cute is whimsical, their characters seemingly clichéd, and in any other context their patter could be vastly irritating. But somehow, Linklater, Delpy and Hawke have created an environment in which the characters can soulfully filibuster the big questions in life whilst outwardly attempting to answer them, in a way that is charming, tender, and most importantly, interactive.
The intricacy and wonder of the series lies in this attempt at an interactive viewing process. It begins simply; they are young and in love - you want to be young and in love. They wander around Europe spouting extremely interesting and insightful nonsense about the world under a canopy of consistently good weather - you also want this. It is romantic, it is dreamlike, but it is not wholly unrealistic. Who wouldn't want this? On a superficial level, the films allow you to superimpose yourself into the dream. However, it is the acknowledgment of flaw, condition and sheer bloody humanity that make the characters seem so real, so tangible. The characters are a Gatsby-like embodiment of self-performativity - they let you understand them exactly as you want to; each person is moved in a different way, and each viewing inspires different emotion. As the series progresses, the characters grow a little older and a little more weary, with a middle installment of 30-something cynicism, until we reach Before Midnight, which as Linklater suggests is a "harder pill to swallow", where love has become a "brutal kind of beast." The very nature of the films, produced over such a long period of time, necessitates the growth of the characters and the growth of the audience. Equally, the production cultivates the type of obsessive analysis that Jesse and Celine are inclined to themselves - nine years is a long time to wait for the next film, and to attempt to predict its outcome.
I don't want to reveal that outcome, as you should all sit down and watch the trilogy immediately, but I'll happily say that Before Midnight is a beautiful piece of cinema. Like its predecessors it is talky and indulgent, and so appeals to those, like myself, who often feel like talking makes them indulgent, which is something one should probably talk about. What makes them so magical is the way one can go on interpreting them, understanding them, obsessing over them. Shameless attempts to draw out similarities between yourself and the characters are inevitable, but they also inspire some of the best conversation and the best experiences, once you get past the semi-pretension of it all. Linklater has created something intensely personal, and his love of story and talk of all kinds (small, big, poetic...) has spawned a fan-base who have experience their own versions of the tale as a result of that intimacy. I for one can't wait to weep over Before Sunset in my thirties, and re-experience Before Midnight as a gin soaked forty year old. Both create visions of a potential future that for Jesse and Celine began 18 years ago in a serene 80-second unbroken shot, and for us lowly mortals began the first time we peeped at their intimacy.
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