Since its arrival in theaters, I've held Before Midnight at arm's length. I've had this tradition for the past, well, over a decade now with this series. I've waited until it's come out of DVD, (and yes, one video tape). I've ordered take out, I've had a glass of wine, I've gotten under blankets and I've enjoyed these movies by myself. No one else is around, no other opinions are in the room with me. It's me, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater. I've enjoyed them for their romance, borderline pretentiousness and meandering conversations through the streets of a beautiful, warm-climate European country.
I felt the moment was right tonight: I had blankets, leftover pasta and a couple of cold IPAs and a few hours by myself. I was expecting a jump into the future and based on a few spoiler alerts, I knew that this wasn't a romantic tale but a realistic one. We left off with Before Sunset: Celine is dancing to Nina Simone after spending an afternoon together walking with Jesse and you're not sure if Jesse is going to make his plane back to New York, back to his wife and young child. You hope he doesn't.
He doesn't. Cut to nine, ten years later... Jesse and Celine are together. They've just dropped Jesse's now 14 year old son back at the airport from their six week Greece vacation. Jesse feels tormented and sad. He can't handle the fact that these are the most precious and pivotal years in his young son's life and he fears that he's missing it. What follows is a twenty minute car ride with Celine and their two young twin girls who sleep through the whole conversation.
Celine and Jesse bicker slightly about her present job circumstances, his remorse over dropping Jesse's son off and you begin to piece together a bit of what happened in the last decade. They soon join their friends at a lush, gorgeous vacation home in Greece where they have another beautiful, meandering conversation over dinner outside. They talk love, romance, reality, death, separation and friendship. Every now and then you get a smack of Celine's pessimism but you think, yes, this is where the reality comes in. Let's see where it goes.
Jesse and Celine are given a night off from their kids and a couple's retreat at a local hotel room with a bottle of wine. What follows is one of the worst fights in coupledom. A fight that last the remainder of the film. It stretches from, "you want me to pick up and move just because of this" to, "tell me everything about myself that you don't like" to "you've regretted your life with me because of, well, me." It was heartbreaking, aggravating and more than anything, you just wanted the movie to end.
Celine was a pill - an absolute nightmare. She's essentially the epitome of everything that I hate, absolutely hate, about women rolled into one monster. She's incredibly angry, self-loathing yet at the same time, greedy for attention, praise and honor. She constantly puts herself in hypothetical conversations that allow for human error, which Jesse treads lightly yet repeatedly falls victim to. He tries his best to tell her she's beautiful, to praise her when she asks for it yet draws the line when it gets too dangerous. Celine can't accept compliments, yet demands them incessantly. Jesse is trying to work out a major life dilemma with her and she is internalizing everything and throwing it back in his face. She literally leaves the hotel room a total of three times, the third time claiming that she no longer loves him. I will give praise to my favorite line of the movie. Celine asks Jesse to tell her what bothers him about her. "Number one, you're fucking nuts," he says.
Perhaps this was just a bad night to watch this. We've been watching The Sopranos from start to finish and just recently saw the episode where Adriana dies. I cried for two fucking days. But as a woman who has been married for two years now, I find this movie to be an absolute disaster to watch alone. Couples have fights, couples make up, couples resent one another, couples stretch the truth to save one another. But what I lack in myself, I don't look for in my husband. The things I blame myself for have no basis or blame for someone else like my husband or anyone for that matter. We are two separate entities who happen to be very much in love with each other. We support each other endlessly and try to relate to one another at all possible opportunities. Seeing a story of a couple who, like a lot of couples, may not make it made me incredibly sad. But more than being realistic, I think this movie did more damage to my ideas of women than it did to my idea of relationships.
It's natural to lash out at the ones closest to you as it is natural to wonder, out loud, where it all went wrong. Jesse and Celine may have their issues, one that's made more complicated with the fact that Jesse got a divorce and left his young child behind to be with Celine. Yet this is their reality now - perhaps it's not as romantic and ideal as it was when they were twenty years old and met on a train. Is this what we all have to look forward to? The wondering "what if?" The constant blame and perpetual sacrifice thrown back into the face of the person you love? I don't think it is, but god damn! It's been eleven years since I laid eyes on my first boyfriend, (who was awful). I think about him often and internally like to blame him for my inability to argue or claim independence in situations where perhaps I should. Yet eleven years later, I find myself very happily married, dealing with perhaps the same demons I had at 20 years old. That's not my old boyfriend's fault: that's mine!
I guess what I'm saying is, I'm clearly drunk and writing a novel about my anger over a fictional story. Perhaps a part of me wants ALL stories like Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight to be like its predecessor. One that only consists of the delicate balance and symbiosis of falling in love. The part that isn't fucked up. Or at least that parts that we all remember about why we got into it in the first place.
So thanks, Celine for being a crazy B. I'm actually looking forward to my husband coming home so I can hug him and remember why I'm not nuts. Just drunk.
