Holly Bailey

“Before Midnight” opens at the Tribeca Film Festival on Monday, and if you can go, you should. The film is allegedly the final of Richard Linklater’s trilogy about two strangers who meet on a train and spend an unforgettable night together in Vienna. “Before Sunrise” led to “Before Sunset,” which finds the couple, Jesse and Celine, reunited after nine years with the realization that finding someone you are truly comfortable with is extremely rare.

This film jumps forward another nine years, this time with Jesse and Celine together on vacation in Greece. Their easy banter is still there, but there’s an underlying tension: Jesse feels guilty about being an absent father to his son, who lives in America with his ex-wife, and Celine seems to be giving into a sense of fatalism about their relationship.

Jesse and Celine continue to be the most realistic couple in film. It’s hard not to identify with or see a little bit of something you’ve experienced in your own relationships on the screen–especially at the climax of the film when a romantic night out is suddenly derailed by an ever-escalating argument. It’s the most realistic fight I’ve ever seen in a movie.

But the thing that has stuck with me since seeing the film about a month ago is the movie’s larger theme: Is love meant to be forever? Early in the film, Jesse and Celine dine with a handful of couples who speak of their breakups as inevitable. Across the table, a widow offers a line that’s hard to forget: “We appear, and we disappear, and we’re important to some, but we’re just passing through.”

In some ways, that line is a comfort if you’ve ever had to part ways with someone you thought would be in your life forever. But ultimately, it’s also very sad. When you love someone, it’s hard to think of them with someone else. Ultimately, there are no easy answers to the question of whether love is meant to last–and it’s that tension that drives the film and makes this couple so worth watching 18 years later.

Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, and Richard Linklater Reflect on ‘Before Midnight,’ Their 20-year Collaboration (via Backstage)

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy (Austin TX)

If you stick around through the closing credits of Before Midnight, the latest film in the trilogy that also includes Before Sunrise and Before Sunset,you’ll see that the movie is dedicated to someone whose name even the most die-hard fans have never heard before: Amy Lehrhaupt. Almost 25 years ago, Lehrhaupt met a young man named Richard Linklater and spent a night with him that he never forgot. Their encounter inspired Linklater to conceive and direct Before Sunrise, the first film in the series. She never saw it, though; unbeknownst to Linklater, by the time that movie came out, Lehrhaupt was dead.

Linklater never mentioned Lehrhaupt by name in the press before promoting Before Midnight—Ethan Hawke has said that the director was uncomfortable mentioning her until “extremely recently”—but he has long made brief references to their encounter. From a number of interviews he’s done over the years, we can now piece together the complete story of how Lehrhaupt helped inspire the series.

From Slacker to Boyhood: Ranking Richard Linklater’s Movies (via Deadspin)

Los Angeles, 2016 (at Los Angeles, California)
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