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Before Midnight
Apr. 13th, 2014 06:07 amI watched the third (and to date final) installment of the Before Sunrise trilogy, Before Midnight, which I found less satisfying than the first two. The most obvious reason, I think, is the setting (or perhaps lack of setting). Before Sunrise and Before Sunset featured Jesse and Celine walking around beautiful European cities, Vienna and Paris; they don’t visit many of the sites, per se, but the cities nonetheless give the movies this glorious atmosphere.
Before Midnight starts out on an island in Greece, which seems promising. But they spend the second half...in a hotel room. And not even an interesting and atmospheric hotel room with a view of the caldera, or anything like that. It’s a fairly generic hotel room with no visible windows.
This is a problem, because these movies rely almost entirely on two elements: the setting and the dialogue. Without the setting to provide visual interest, there’s really nothing left but the dialogue...and the quality of the dialogue seems to have fallen.
Before Midnight is almost half an hour longer than the first two movies, which both clocked in at a svelte eighty minutes. The filmmakers don’t seem to have more to say this time around; if anything, they seem to have said everything in their first two films. They’re no longer quite sure what they want to say, therefore say everything, and end up with a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
The problem, I think, is that the filmmakers seem afraid to let Celine and Jesse grow up or fundamentally change. Not only are they unhappy, but they’re unhappy for the same reasons they were unhappy at twenty-three. As Jesse says in Before Sunrise, his life would be better “If I could just accept the fact that my life was supposed to be difficult, that's what's to be expected, then I might not get so pissed off about it, and I'd just be glad when something nice happens."
But he can’t accept it. He’s forty-one years old and neither he nor Celine have accepted even slightly that their lives will inevitably be imperfect (because all lives are imperfect) and they will inevitably have to make compromises. They rage against it. They make themselves miserable because of it.
One of the things I loved about the first movie is that it did deal with this dissatisfaction, the sense that life ought to be going more smoothly than it is. But three movies in, it’s becoming a bit tiresome to listen to the same lament. Find something new to be unhappy about already!
Before Midnight starts out on an island in Greece, which seems promising. But they spend the second half...in a hotel room. And not even an interesting and atmospheric hotel room with a view of the caldera, or anything like that. It’s a fairly generic hotel room with no visible windows.
This is a problem, because these movies rely almost entirely on two elements: the setting and the dialogue. Without the setting to provide visual interest, there’s really nothing left but the dialogue...and the quality of the dialogue seems to have fallen.
Before Midnight is almost half an hour longer than the first two movies, which both clocked in at a svelte eighty minutes. The filmmakers don’t seem to have more to say this time around; if anything, they seem to have said everything in their first two films. They’re no longer quite sure what they want to say, therefore say everything, and end up with a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
The problem, I think, is that the filmmakers seem afraid to let Celine and Jesse grow up or fundamentally change. Not only are they unhappy, but they’re unhappy for the same reasons they were unhappy at twenty-three. As Jesse says in Before Sunrise, his life would be better “If I could just accept the fact that my life was supposed to be difficult, that's what's to be expected, then I might not get so pissed off about it, and I'd just be glad when something nice happens."
But he can’t accept it. He’s forty-one years old and neither he nor Celine have accepted even slightly that their lives will inevitably be imperfect (because all lives are imperfect) and they will inevitably have to make compromises. They rage against it. They make themselves miserable because of it.
One of the things I loved about the first movie is that it did deal with this dissatisfaction, the sense that life ought to be going more smoothly than it is. But three movies in, it’s becoming a bit tiresome to listen to the same lament. Find something new to be unhappy about already!
