VOL. 6 ISSUE 97 • TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2013
EDGEDAVAO
INdulge! A3
ENTERTAINMENT
The End is the Beginning is the End Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight
by Jay Rosas Can love last, or perhaps a more relevant question, can love last in this era of superficial connections and busy lives? How can two individuals make it work? Is it really possible to have a happy ending in the real, cruel world? Does the beauty of sunsets lingers for just a fleeting moment and is rekindled until the next? These are questions that may or may not find their answers in the third instalment to Richard Linklater’s Before series. We get re-acquainted with our two leads and ponder upon these questions as the film unfolds in the usual string of conversations that we have become accustomed to. It’s a familiar path but it’s refreshing, almost miraculous how it avoided the usual routes of cliché we encounter over and over again when we talk about love. Almost ten years have passed since we were introduced to the two’s meeting in a Viennese train in 1994’s Before Sunrise, the verve of young lovers radiating, unwary of the future. We met them again in 2004’s Before Sunset in Paris, now in their early thirties trying to rekindle the connection and unbridled fervor of that fateful meeting. In Midnight, we find them spending summer in Greece’s southern Peloponnese region (Greece as location is important here, both historical and contemporary), now 40-ish with twin daughters and Jesse’s son from an ex-wife. The film opens in an airport scene with Jesse sending off his son Hank to Chicago (after spending a Greek summer too), the father incessantly engaging his son in a conversation only to be countered by curt answers, finally being dismissed when he offered to come to his piano recital saying things would be better off without his father’s presence. Hank is not disrespectful but practical, his reticence maybe hinting at his generation whose sense of connection is molded by technology, by iPhones and Facebook. (Interestingly, Jesse sports a shirt with the a design for Neptune Records, a record label in the 60s. This is matched by Celine’s iPhone casing which looks like a cassette tape.) When Jesse walks out of the airport lobby, we are greeted by a familiar tune and we see Celine waiting for him. While driving through scenic landscapes and past Greek ruins, we listen to their usual animated banter, and one suddenly notices the stark contrast, how different it is from the conversation with his son. Celine talks about work, her possibly joining a government agency, in which Jesse doesn’t seem to agree with. Jesse talks about Hank some more, longing to spend some more time with him (so that he could teach him how to throw a baseball, and things a father should be teaching their sons), and the exchange escalates into an argument about parenting. Their conversations with each other and with friends, in the course of
the film, is marked with the familiar spontaneity, only this time it feels richer and nuanced. They have a decade of life on and off together, a minefield of experiences they pick up assessing their relationship and for probing for a future of possibilities. When Jesse mentions that his grandma died, they go on discussing who will outlive each other. The exchanges, which escalate to a near-ticking bomb in that memorable hotel scene, spew out painful truths not just about the characters but of ourselves. It’s like reading a really good book or listening to stories of people we know, stories we have become familiar with and have become unconsciously intertwined into our own personal narratives. This convergence of elements of their past and probable future seems to be reinforcing the importance of the present. How does it matter when the past is light-years away and the future too bleak to look forward to? Jesse’s ramblings when discussing with the guys about an idea of a book he wants to write and which he tentatively calls “Temporary Cast-members of a LongRunning But Little-Seen Production of a Play Called Fleeting” is an insightful inside-reference of how the fragility of time impinges on the lives of our characters (he insists it’s
about perception, while his friend Stefanos clearly sees it’s about time). It is also a convergence of perspectives on love and relationship, which is beautifully realized in that group conversation. Everybody pitching in their life lessons: the young couple who seemed to have built something out of Skype, the Greek couple on love’s practicalities and Natalia’s musings on the ephemeral nature of memories and our transitory lives. While at some moments the film reaches the point of existential weariness, it doesn’t feel burdensome, rather it is enriching. You feel like you too have gained this perceptiveness, this zest for life, a celebration of things present. In that often talked about scene where the couples gaze at the sunset, Celine accompanies the setting of the sun with the words “still there… still there… gone,” with both sad longing and thankfulness of having to be in that moment, that not knowing the future is important because “the point is searching”. Jesse may have recognized this as he attempts to bring us to the cusp of romantic attraction, recreating a familiar intimacy, seeped in dreaded fairytale fashion, but grounded in the ironic realities of love and relationships. If you want true love, or some version of it, this is as real as it can get. Rating: 4.3/5
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