Stars: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
Director: Richard Linklater
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Adapted Screenplay)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars
The Godfather, Part III. The Return of the King. Return of the Jedi. Toy Story 3. The track record for completing a trilogy after two magnificent first entries is hit-or-miss, but Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, and Ethan Hawke decided to give it a shot, giving us one more portrait of Jesse and Celine, the young lovers who met eighteen years earlier.
(Spoilers Ahead) Midnight for me poses a challenge that the other two films hadn't, and I was far more nervous headed into this film than the other two. Aside from vaulted expectations, part of the reason I loved the other two films so deeply was that I could connect to them as a viewer. Sunrise reminded me of a weekend I spent with a guy when I was twenty-I'd felt the finesse of tumbling into love and living entirely in an instant. Sunset is all too familiar to me; the story of two people hovering around thirty realizing that the love they've spent the past three decades hoping for themselves may never happen or may have slipped through their fingers. Midnight, though, is something I haven't experienced yet. I'm nowhere near that moment in your forties where everything has become not only familiar, but the far less attractive term of routine. Where your life revolves around not yourself but those around you-your kids, your spouse. I was scared that it wouldn't quite hit me in the same way as Sunrise and especially Sunset, and that perhaps I'd have to wait a decade to connect with the film.
Linklater's movie doesn't move that way, though, and while I couldn't interact with the film in an experienced way, I still could feel it in an emotional, tangible way. The movie doesn't require you to have children or to even have been married to connect with these two people. Sunrise highlights the chance of decisions, Sunset the loneliness of decisions, and Midnight goes for the permanence of decisions. We open the movie for a third time with Jesse (all three films start with Hawke, if I recall correctly) sending his son back to his mother. We assume that Sunset gave us a happy ending, and for the large part we're right. Jesse and Celine did stay together, though they never married, and he left his wife. They have two twin girls and live together in Paris, with Jesse a successful writer and Celine about to take on a high profile position.
The film during the first thirty minutes had me trepidatious, even though it was all quite divine. We actually learn a bit about the other people in these two characters' lives. We see their children, some casual acquaintances, and we have a protracted scene with Jesse and Celine interacting at a dinner table. It's a great framing device for the remainder of the movie, as we get to see the public faces of these characters, and how they are mildly more tolerant of each others' idiosyncrasies when company is there.
One of their fellow couples has bought them a hotel room stay as a treat, and so we leave the children and the dinner and are once again walking through an exotic European locale (a Greek island) with these two chatting about life and their love and their marriage. The conversation takes a darker, more harrowing turn with the couple in a hotel room. Here, Celine and Jesse go from a romantic sexual experience to airing all of their dirty laundry about each other. How Celine thinks he's driving a wedge in-between them by wanting to move to Chicago, how she has struggled so severely with her thoughts on feminism in regard to her mothering, and about alleged infidelities between the two of them. Jesse alternates between understanding and lashing right back at her. The conversation probably resonated quite strongly with anyone who has been married for an extended period of time. Few films take on this period of our lives (in most people's cases, the longest periods of our lives), which makes it so interesting. Not only do they talk about questions of not loving each other anymore, they also go into the much deeper questions of why they fell in love in the first place and would the me of today have loved the you of today if it weren't for our shared history. The movie almost ends on a dour note, with Celine storming out by saying that she doesn't think she loves Jesse anymore, and for a brief moment I thought the film would end there (it's that kind of movie, where you aren't guaranteed a happy ending), but they rekindle their love in time for the title scene. Jesse says that he loves her unconditionally, and how much more could they want out of life, and Celine, by changing the subject to a flirty game, agrees. It's a beautiful, fitting end to a truly remarkable series of films.
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