Before Midnight

2013 sequel to a sequel

Rating: 16/20 (Jen: Didn't rate this one either. I think she's mad at me.)

Plot: It's nine years later, and Jesse and Celine are vacationing in Greece. They talk some more.

I definitely did not expect a nude scene here.

I wish I would have watched these movies when they came out because I likely would have connected with them even more. I'm just a little younger than Delpy and Hawke, but I would have been close enough to their age when these came out. Oh, well. I guess when the fourth one hits theaters in 2022, I can watch that one.

This is a nifty cinematic experiment Linklater's got here, and he couldn't have picked better actors than Delpy and Hawke. One, they're both easy on the eyes, so the sexual energy and chemistry feels very real. Also, they're just both so good. These movies really feel improvised to me although I've read enough to know that they really aren't at all. The co-stars wrote this with Linklater which might give help give it a more organic feel. But they're just so natural, and slight movements of their heads, perfectly-timed blinks, or tentative reaches with hands--all which might be scripted--just seem flawless.

This one's got our characters living in the middle of their happily-ever-after except you see some cracks developing in their relationship. A long (and honestly, a little tiring) dinner conversation with three other couples almost fools us into thinking we're seeing Jesse and Celine at three stages of their lives--the budding sexually-vibrant love of a young couple, a middle-aged couple who can finish each other's sentences and probably have great sex, and an older couple who still seem very much in love. That is a bit of a trick, however, as the couple, after a long stroll and chat that very much felt like an extension of the first two movies, get to their destination and start hurling grenades at each other. At that point, things get very real. I don't know about other married people watching this, but it was hard for me to hear some of that dialogue because I'm pretty sure some of those same grenades have been hurled in my homes.

I've probably already said too much.

I'll anticipate seeing the fourth installment, likely titled Before Brunch, in 2022 for a continuation of this multi-film dissertation on time and sex and what time does to sex and what sex does to time.