They’ll Be Your Mirror

I have finally caught up with Jesse and Celine. It’s taken three films, at nine-year intervals–Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (opening May 24)–but I am no longer jealous of their romance. All three of us are now 41-year-old parents with similar fears and complaints. Their lives have become less the stuff of fantasy and more the stuff of resentments, recriminations and regrets. So, more accurately, they have caught up to me.

Though each of the Before movies is a romance set in a gorgeous European location (Vienna in Sunrise, Paris in Sunset, a Greek island in Midnight), few film series have attempted the same level of realism. Each movie was made for under $3 million–probably Iron Man 3’s budget for billboards–and consists mostly of two people talking. I left a screening of Before Midnight shaken, sad, happy and not knowing whom to talk to. But the best part of my job is that I can get nearly anyone to talk to me, so I sat down with stars Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy and director Richard Linklater, who gang-wrote Sunset and Midnight together, to discuss the series. (More on that later.)

I wanted to talk to them about what I had just seen, because I cannot imagine feeling closer to any two characters than I do to Jesse and Celine–and I don’t even know if I like them. It’s hard to create characters we like; it’s harder to create characters we are.

When Before Sunrise came out, I was 23, hated my fact-checking job and didn’t have a girlfriend. I’d never had a one-night stand or gone overseas for a semester. In the movie, a 23-year-old Texan, Jesse (Hawke), meets a 23-year-old Parisian, Celine (Delpy), on a train and persuades her to disembark and spend a night with him in Vienna– a night in which they have sex in a park. To me, this was outrageous fantasy. I saw these characters–specifically, Jesse–as better-looking, gutsier, cooler versions of me. Celine was the French version of every girl I crushed on: smart, makeup-resistant, a little angry, a little crazy. Jesse and Celine walk around the city, flirt-philosophizing about sex, aging and the differences between men and women. When they have to part ways, they don’t risk ruining their relationship with letters and calls that diminish in number and intensity. Instead, they agree to meet at a train station in six months. Then they kiss in a way only 23-year-olds can kiss when they’ve stayed up all night without brushing.

Nine years later, they’re reunited in Before Sunset, which was even better. Celine never showed up at the station; just before Facebook made it impossible to lose contact with anyone, they couldn’t find each other. Jesse writes a best-selling novel about their night together; she goes to his reading in Paris. Jesse is married with a kid. She’s got a boyfriend. For 80 minutes they just talk, yet they build more tension than an action movie.

Like the characters, I was 32 when Before Sunset came out, and like Jesse, I was a writer living in New York City. I rented the movie and watched it with my lovely wife Cassandra in our tiny apartment. It would be foolish of me to admit exactly what I was thinking about while watching the most romantic American film ever made. (People who like the Before series say things like “American film.”) The most I will say is that I was once dumped by a college girlfriend who was very smart and very dramatic and, to my great shock and thrill, proclaimed her love to me years later. She agreed to leave her boyfriend, and I sat for six hours waiting for her outside a coffee shop. She never showed up, just as Celine didn’t. I will admit that I thought that Jesse and Celine were screwed. That projecting all those qualities onto someone you met once, nine years ago, was sure to cause irrevocable disappointment. Curled up with Cassandra in our apartment, I happily realized that Jesse and Celine weren’t really in love. The brilliance of Before Sunset is that not only is the movie aware of it, but the characters are too.

Or so I thought. If I had known anything about Before Midnight before seeing it, I wouldn’t have gasped when we find out that Jesse and Celine are still together, with twins. These were not people who should actually be together; these were the stars of the world’s greatest romance. Not that being married and having kids can’t be romantic, but let’s just say that Romeo and Juliet didn’t end with arguing over who agreed to pick up Li’l Romeo from soccer practice.

Jesse and I are still writers, and he’s still way more successful than I am. Jesse and Celine are on vacation in Greece and still have philosophical conversations, but the big fight in Before Midnight–and it might be the greatest fight between a couple in an American film–is the same fight we all have. When Jesse and Celine first meet, they joke about the horrible argument a couple is having in front of them. Now they’re having it.

It would be foolish of me to admit exactly what I relate to in that fight. I will say I’ve said and heard and thought many of those same fighting words. Jesse and Celine struggle heroically to remember that what they now find annoying about each other is what they once found endearing. They engage in the tiny acts of bravery–risking rejection, telling the truth and suppressing pride–that are the only ways to keep a relationship. When you’re 41, there’s far more romance in whether a couple will stay together than in whether they will get together.

Meeting the creators of something you love is never smart, because you’ve projected so much of your own experience onto their work. And fans make terrible journalists, since fans always want to talk more than they want to listen. So I’m not at my best when I meet Hawke, Delpy and Linklater at a Greek restaurant in midtown Manhattan and immediately find out that–unlike me–they had always assumed that Jesse and Celine would stay together. For six months, they worked on a version of Before Midnight that chronicled a day of their lives in San Francisco: they shop, look after the kids and don’t talk to each other until the last 15 minutes of the movie. “Then we realized it’s not that interesting,” Hawke says. “We didn’t want it to be a movie about how being 40 sucks.”

To be 40 may not be a morass of tedium, but it isn’t easy. “Is this film romantic?” Linklater asks. “Well, they eat together, they’re still making each other laugh, they still seem to want to sleep together–at a certain point, that’s as good as you’re going to do.” Linklater and his actors turn a victory that small into intense drama.

So intense, some people can’t take it. At a screening the night before we spoke, Hawke tells me, one viewer–who happened to be going through a divorce–left the theater crying during the fight scene. Another viewer touched his wife’s knee, and she pushed him away. “He thought, ‘I’m really relating to this,’ and she was like, ‘I’m really relating to this too, and I’m not liking it,'” Hawke says. Linklater adds, “Before they see it, I ask friends, ‘How are you doing?'”

Which is why I stayed home, nervously making dinner and bathing our 4-year-old, while Cassandra was at a screening of Before Midnight. She came home, pretended to be a dinosaur as Laszlo and I hid under his covers, and then we went upstairs when he went to sleep. She said the movie made her feel lucky she wasn’t divorced or trying to be a mom who worked full time. She came home with no resentments, recriminations or regrets. I felt lucky too. Then I started talking.

Soon we were fighting about the kinds of things Jesse and Celine fight about, like who works more, whether she’s insecure, whether I flirt too much. And whether we have to spend $5,000 to get our trees trimmed, and at some point, somehow, there was this: “If I did things like you want them done, people would say this house smells and it’s disgusting and Joel’s career must be falling apart and I don’t want to be friends with these people.”

It was the same fight all couples will have after seeing the movie. And I was so happy to be having it.