Before Midnight – Bitch Flicks

Obsessed with Boyhood: The Latent Misogyny Running Rampant in Richard Linklater’s Films

On the surface, a lot of his female characters reflect strong ideals. … But take a deeper look and Linklater’s female characters tell another story: one of a creator deeply obsessed with ignorant male stereotypes and the women that encourage them. … Looking back through his films, they all contain this running theme of underdeveloped man-children who are routinely validated in their anti-woman approach.

This guest post written by Maya Bastian appears as part of our theme week on Unpopular Opinions.

Disappointed. That would be the first way to describe how I felt after walking out of Richard Linklater’s latest release Everybody Wants Some!!, 20 minutes into the film. Disgusted. That was my second response. These feelings quickly turned to outrage as I realized that I had just played witness to the reversion of cultural ideals that has overtaken our society as of late.

Hailed as “achingly perceptive” by Variety and “utopian” by The New York Times, Linklater himself refers to the film as a “spiritual sequel” to his earlier nostalgia-laden hit Dazed and Confused. In reality, it’s an intensely sophomoric and outdated romp through the lives of five college jocks who bandy around, seducing girls, and partying until they drop. The male protagonists refer to women as “bitches” when they get rejected and intelligent women are thought of as “dykes.” Set in 1980s Texas, it’s a throwback to Porky’s–era films, where the women are idly brutalized and consent is disregarded several times throughout the course of the movie.

What is astounding is that the glaring misogyny that runs rampant throughout is completely brushed aside by just about every critic. The Guardian gave it a rave review, saying, “The attitudes towards women are unenlightened but the freshman of Linklater’s joyful 80’s campus movie reveal occasional complexity.” RogerEbert.com called it a “gentle film” but I would argue the opposite. There is nothing gentle about flouting consent and flaunting camera angles that are meant to denigrate the female form.

The disappointing part is that I’ve been a fan of Linklater’s films for some time, excited by his subversion of narrative techniques and his bold commitment to strong characters that buck the status quo. Waking Life was startlingly moving and profound. Tape was cinematic genius in its execution.

On the surface, a lot of his female characters reflect strong ideals. Sooze (Amie Carey) in Suburbia is a hardcore third-waver and lashes out “angrily” about smashing the patriarchy. The lead female character Amy (Uma Thurman) in Tape presents as a strong woman and an accomplished lawyer. Celine (Julie Delpy) in Before Sunrise and the rest of the Before Trilogy, is intellectual, graceful, and human. Sure, they all seem like feminist role models. But take a deeper look and Linklater’s female characters tell another story: one of a creator deeply obsessed with ignorant male stereotypes and the women that encourage them.

After viewing Everybody Wants Some!!, I had to reassess my devotion to Linklater. It led me to review his earlier titles, only to realize that he is suffering from the classic virgin/whore rhetoric. Every one of his narratives are about male characters running rampant over women’s rights.

Looking back through his films, they all contain this running theme of underdeveloped man-children who are routinely validated in their anti-woman approach. These characters often appear fun and exciting. No one really challenges them on their behavior, most simply laugh it off. A glaring example is Steve Zahn’s character in Suburbia, aptly named Buff. He primarily exists to reflect an attitude that glorifies acting poorly, hurting others, and treating women as objects. Yet no one ever seriously addresses his behavior except for Sooze, the token feminist, who gets quickly shot down by her peers.

While he does include the occasional strong female voice, Linklater tends to tokenize these women. They are often one-note characters who are stereotypes of themselves. Even Celine in the Before Sunrise series falls victim to this pattern. Though she starts off as a thinking, feeling woman with complexity in Before Sunrise, by the end of the series, she has devolved into a bitter, nitpicky wife, treading alongside all of the female “married woman” stereotypes that we fight so hard to deflect and dismantle. In Before Midnight, her character presents as “flat” and one-dimensional, with Linklater adhering to the school of thought that strong, intelligent women are incapable of compromise and empathy.

Linklater marginalizes his female characters in almost every movie that he has made. Tape, while brilliant in its technical prowess, reduces the only female character (Uma Thurman), as an object to be fought over. Dazed and Confused is another glaring instance of hyper-sexualization, where practically every woman lacks definition. The only substantial female character is the nerdy redhead Cynthia (Marissa Ribisi), who ends up being objectified by the much older Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey) in what is considered one of THE classic lines of the film.

As Linklater’s oeuvre evolves, the sidelining of his female characters increases. In School of Rock, the only two adult female characters (Sarah Silverman and Joan Cusack) are both uptight, angry, and only serve as foils to guitarist Dewey Finn’s (Jack Black) brilliant plans. Even in the much lauded Boyhood, we see signs of the director’s tendency to tokenize women. In Linklater’s world, we can only ever be seen on one side of the virgin/whore rhetoric. Either he focuses his camera on our bodies and our loose morals or he martyrs us, as is the case with the long-suffering single mother (Patricia Arquette) in Boyhood. While it’s worth mentioning that Patricia Arquette’s performance is brilliant, it still serves as further proof that Linklater perpetuates male-centric stories where women exist as an afterthought, only putting them front and center when they can fulfill society’s categorization of women into tiny, little boxes.

Which brings us back to his latest effort. Shockingly produced by a woman, Megan Ellison of Zero Dark Thirty fame, Everybody Wants Some!! continues to receive rave reviews. Apparently bro culture has reached its cultural apotheosis.

Salon writer and self-proclaimed feminist, Joanna Novak, even professed that she didn’t see anything wrong with the throwback and glorification of bro culture, though she jokes that looking past the “casual sexism” and enjoying the “bro-centric ideology” might make her a “bad feminist.” But here’s the thing. The longer we as a society continue to glorify boys acting badly, laugh at a bunch of jocks using women and lying to get them into bed, jeer along with them at so called “imperfect” bodies, the longer rape culture will exist and the objectification of women will reign supreme. Why is it so hard to convict a rapist? Perhaps it’s because the media sees handsome, swagger-ful boys as cute and cheeky as opposed to predatory. Perpetuating this social construct of masculinity in a time when we need desperately to dissect it and deflect it instead, is a dangerous path.

While the reviews of this pointless, nostalgia-saturated narrative are shocking, the response isn’t surprising. The current swath of the films’ reviewers are primarily men who seem to be joyfully reliving their youth.

One shining light in this otherwise woeful collection of reviews is Jill Richard’s article in the Los Angeles Review of Books. She delineates that as a culture, we are past the age of Animal House style fraternity. Richard writes:

“If one is a bro, the bro squad looks like a great time. But I suppose I feel like that squad wouldn’t have me as a member, or would rape me, and that makes all the difference. […] …There is no non-sinister defense for the ‘American male birthright’ as a conceptual category.”

On a larger scale, Linklater has not just disappointed me as a filmmaker, but as an artist. We have reached an apex in our society, where art must be a voice for the under-represented. Artists have an obligation to create pieces that speak to the condition of our culture and of the world. The time to laud ego-centric films that glorify the glory days of its maker have passed. We no longer need to see work that makes us laugh but that does not make us think.

During the release of Boyhood, one Los Angeles Times critic refused to pander to the flow of warm reviews. While just about everyone was hailing the film as genius, Kenneth Turan took a solitary stance against the film, amid consternation from fellow critics. What he said rings profoundly true in our age of hyperbole and over-hyped cinema. While he did not end up reviewing the film, he did write an incredibly astute article on the nature of genius and the way our society creates cultural impunity by lauding films that don’t deserve it. Turan writes:

“…The fuss about ‘Boyhood’ emphasized to me how much we live in a culture of hyperbole, how much we yearn to anoint films and call them masterpieces, perhaps to make our own critical lives feel more significant because it allows us to lay claim to having experienced something grand and meaningful.”

As Indiewire‘s Sam Adams writes in response to Turan’s perspective, asserting the need for diverse opinions in film criticism:

“Masterpieces, however, are not made so by unanimous praise, but by careful scrutiny. Criticisms, and the extent to which they illuminate the fascinating imperfections beneath those ‘masterpieces’ surfaces, only make them stronger.”

Turan’s and Adams’ points ring true to many socially conscious ears. Richard Linklater is no longer a genius in my eyes, but simply a talented filmmaker who has achieved success by pandering to societal norms, sadly failing to use his indefatigable intelligence to see through them.

Disappointing at best, destructive and debilitating at worst.

See also at Bitch Flicks:

The Flattening of Celine: How Before Midnight Reduces a Feminist Icon

The One Night Stand That Wasn’t: Before Sunrise and Before Sunset‘s Jesse and Celine

Boyhood (Featuring Girlhood)

The Bad Mamas of Contemporary Cinema

Maya Bastian is a writer and award-winning filmmaker who focuses on socio-political issues. She sits on the board of Breakthroughs Film Festival, a short film fest championing new generation female filmmakers. Follow her on social media @mayabasti or check out her website for more info: www.mayabastian.com.

The Ten Most-Read Posts from July 2013

Did you miss these popular posts on Bitch Flicks? If so, here’s your chance to catch up.

“Sixteen Candles, Rape Culture, and the Anti-Woman Politics of 2013″ by Stephanie Rogers

“The Killing and the Misogyny of Hating Bad Mothers” by Leigh Kolb

“Does Hollywood Revolve Around Men? ‘One Man’ Video Says Yes” by Megan Kearns

“Glee‘s Not So Gleeful Representation of Disabled Women” by Erin Tatum

“The Flattening of Celine: How Before Midnight Reduces a Feminist Icon” by Molly McCaffrey

“Cool Robots, Bad-Ass Monsters and Disappointment in Pacific Rim“ by Leigh Kolb

“Am I the Only Feminist Who Didn’t Really Like The Heat? Or Why I Want My Humor Intersectional” by Megan Kearns

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Consent Issues (Seasons 1-2)” by Lady T

“The To Do List: The Movie I’ve Been Waiting For” by Leigh Kolb

“The Strong Yet Traditional Women of World War Z“ by Amanda Rodriguez

The Flattening of Celine: How ‘Before Midnight’ Reduces a Feminist Icon

This is a guest post by Molly McCaffrey.

Before Midnight movie poster

There are numerous reasons why Before Midnight—the third film in the Richard Linklater Before Sunrise/Before Sunset trilogy—is an important film.

Jesse and Celine in Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight

It’s an important film first and foremost because it’s a film about grown-ups doing grown-up things. The main characters—Celine (played by Julie Delpy) and Jesse (played by Ethan Hawke)—are in their forties raising two kids together, so the film revolves around the kind of issues such people face: how to be good parents, how to balance the needs of their careers, how to keep the spark alive in their relationship, how to deal with the aging process, etc.

Celine, Jesse, and daughters in the car

Thankfully the film doesn’t ever give into the gross-out humor that seems to almost be a requirement now for other movies about middle-age—This Is 40, Funny People, and Bridesmaids come to mind (as if moviegoers won’t see a movie that doesn’t have at least one fart joke or an explosion).

Movie poster for This Is 40

Before Midnight—like its predecessors—is also important because of its focus on character development, writing, and acting. This is because, thankfully, the major players and co-writers—Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke—believe in creating art that is both realistic and thoughtful. It seems obvious that the three of them want viewers to walk out of the theater asking relevant philosophical questions about both themselves and the characters, a goal which on its own makes these films admirable.

Jesse and Celine holding hands

Further demonstrating its importance is the fact that, unlike almost every other movie made today, the characters in this film look real. Sure, when the first film in the trilogy—Before Sunrise—came out, these actors had movie star faces and bodies:

Jesse and Celine in Before Sunrise

But by now they look like regular people:

Jesse and Celine in Before Midnight

Celine has fleshy arms, big hips, thick thighs, and a bit of a stomach while Jesse’s age shows in his drawn face, his lined forehead, and the countless wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. Neither of these actors is likely to be cast in the part of the leading woman or man in a Hollywood film, but it’s their so-called flaws that make them so interesting and, in the case of Celine, so beautiful and such an inspiration. If more actresses looked like Celine, then maybe American women would finally learn to give up the notion that they must be thin to be attractive.

Jesse and Celine in Before Midnight

But for all of its accomplishments, there is a major problem at the heart of Before Midnight, and that problem is that Celine’s character is no longer believable or even entirely empathetic. This is in contrast to Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, where both Celine and Jesse are depicted as the most likeable and well-rounded liberals on the planet.

Celine and Jesse

In all three of the films, Celine’s feminism is a central focus of the story: she talks to Jesse about her desire to have her own life, her own ideas, and to not be defined by a man. And in Before Sunset and Before Sunrise, she expresses a desire to fall in love and share her life with a man in a committed relationship. In that way, Celine is a wonderful depiction of a modern heterosexual feminist, something we don’t see often enough on the big (or little) screen.

Celine and Jesse arguing in the car

But in Before Midnight, Celine’s feminism pushes her to behave in ways we’ve not seen her do before—she seems much more hostile and much less empathetic toward Jesse even though he has supported her values and her career throughout their nine-year relationship.

Celine and daughters

This is especially surprising given that in the first two films, Celine and Jesse agree about gender roles and feminist issues. But in Before Midnight they fight about it from start to finish—even though Jesse agrees with all of Celine’s ideals, making Celine’s depiction unrealistic and troubling.

This problem manifests itself in the following ways: *SPOILERS AHEAD*

1) Celine demonstrates no empathy for Jesse when he expresses regret after they drop off his son at the airport at the end of the summer so he can return home to his mother in the U.S.

Later Celine claims that Jesse is always moody after his son leaves, so it’s surprising that she isn’t more empathetic in this situation. Isn’t that what people do in a healthy relationship? Anticipate each other’s struggles and help them through it? This is just the first example of the ways that Celine acts as if they are in an unhealthy or unhappy relationship even though there are no other signs that they are.

2) Instead of being empathetic in that moment, Celine picks a fight with Jesse, insisting that he wants her to give up her career and move to the States even though he doesn’t ever say that he does.

It would have been so much more interesting for them to have a real discussion about this issue since that’s what healthy couples usually do in these types of impossible situations—acknowledge the difficulty of it, weigh the pros and cons over a period of time, and then make a decision. But Celine seems to see Jesse as incapable of compromising or working with her even though he has evidently done so in the past.

3) She won’t consider moving to the U.S., so Jesse can live near his son even though he moved to France so she could be near her mother when giving birth to their twin daughters.

Not only won’t she move, she doesn’t even want to talk about moving. Her resistance to merely discussing the idea seems strange simply because he has moved for her in the past, and again a healthy relationship between two intelligent adults often requires both of them to put the other’s career first at different times.

4) Celine brings up their problems in front of others at dinner.

There’s not much to say about this except that it’s such an immature move that it doesn’t fit at all with what we already know about Celine, a successful, intelligent, confident woman.

5) She offers little support when Jesse’s grandmother dies.

Not only does she change the subject pretty quickly, but she also declines to go to the funeral when he asks her to do so.

6) Celine implies Jesse was only drawn to her for superficial reasons.

At one point Celine asks Jesse if he would still want her to spend the day with him if he saw her on a train today. It’s a ridiculous question considering how beautiful and intelligent Celine is, especially given that Jesse hasn’t aged as well as she has, a fact acknowledged by Jesse when he says, “The real question is would you want to get off the train with me.” As a result, her question seems to imply that he—and all men by extension—are only attracted to young women and could not possibly find a forty-year-old woman attractive, an idea that may be believable in Hollywood but doesn’t hold water in the world Linklater has created for Celine and Jesse.

7) She resents his career and does so while simultaneously asking him to respect hers.

This resentment is demonstrated when she complains about their trip to Greece to spend time with another author, when she is reluctant to autograph Jesse’s books for a fan in their hotel (even though the books are about her), and when she insists he is never allowed to write about her again. It’s hard to believe that a true feminist—like the Celine we have come to know and love in the earlier films—would indulge in this kind of hypocritical behavior.

8) She holds Jesse responsible for all of her problems with men and the patriarchal society we live in.

She does this even though he’s proven he’s not that kind of guy and understands she’s not the kind of woman who would put up with that kind of man, explaining, “You could never be submissive to anybody.”

9) Finally, this problem comes to an ugly head when Celine tells Jesse—at the height of their argument about their future—that she doesn’t think she loves him anymore and then walks out on him.

It’s a cruel thing to say even if she does mean it, but the fact that Jesse doesn’t take it seriously and they make up leads the viewer to believe that she doesn’t even mean it and has possibly even said—or insinuated it—before. In that sense, it feels like she is playing a game with him, a dangerous childish game that is the adult equivalent of sticking your tongue out at someone. It’s a moment when Celine shows no respect for Jesse’s feelings, and viewers are left to wonder how she can expect him to respect her if she doesn’t do the same for him.

******

Because other aspects of this film—including acting and characterization—are so strong, I can only conclude that these problems with Celine are the result of bad writing. It’s certainly true that the writing in Before Midnight lacks the subtlety and complexity evident in the first two films.

Good writing demands well-rounded characters, but Celine seems more flat and one-dimensional in this film than she ever has before. Jesse’s flaws are rather ordinary—he doesn’t like to clean the house, and he has stubbornly held onto his slacker facial hair. But Celine’s flaws are the opposite of ordinary—rather than being average, they are so extreme in the third film that they don’t even seem believable given what else we know about her character. If she’s an educated, intelligent, confident, and strong woman, why doesn’t she trust the man who loves these things about her?

Though they haven’t done it before, Linklater, Delpy, and Hawke fall back on stereotypical ideas about what it means to be a feminist when writing Celine’s dialogue for this film. They make her seem harsh and narrow-minded—even irrational at times—rather than thoughtful and open-minded. In this way, the film harkens back to another well-known “talky” film about a heterosexual couple discussing important issues, 1978’s Same Time, Next Year.

Movie poster for Same Time, Next Year

Unfortunately it feels like Before Midnight also co-opted that film’s take on intelligent couples by merely showing them in constant disagreement. It’s a depiction that feels outdated given what we know by now about communication in healthy, equitable relationships.

This seems to be an honest mistake, but it’s a disappointing one nonetheless, especially since it’s so hard to find movies about strong feminists and because the two previous films sidestepped these landmines so well by making Celine both willful and caring.

In fact, by depicting strong, intelligent women as incapable of compromise and empathy, Before Midnight reinforces all of the ugly stereotypes about feminists and sends the message that you can’t be a good feminist if you stay home with the kids or sew curtains or move for your spouse. When in reality, feminists—female and male alike—can do all of the above since feminism isn’t about acting a certain way but rather about embracing equality.

This misrepresentation is alluded to when Celine says to Jesse, “I feel close to you… But sometimes, I don’t know? I feel like you’re breathing helium and I’m breathing oxygen.”

It’s this comment that best sums up the problems with the film because it implies that men and women are reduced simply to their differences and that they are, in fact, so different that they cannot possibly relate, agree, compromise, or even get along past a certain point in their relationship. It’s a rehashing of the old men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus idea that is anti-feminist and unbelievable as well as being one that this viewer found very difficult to relate to.

Molly McCaffrey is the author of the short story collection How to Survive Graduate School & Other Disasters, the co-editor of Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There, and the founder of I Will Not Diet, a blog devoted to healthy living and body acceptance. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati and has worked with Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple and World War Z author, Max Brooks. Currently she teaches at Western Kentucky University and designs books for Steel Toe Books. She has just finished work on her first memoir, You Belong to Us, which tells the story of McCaffrey meeting her biological family.

Travel Films Week: The One-Night Stand That Wasn’t: ‘Before Sunrise’ and ‘Before Sunset’s Jesse and Celine

Before Sunset movie poster

This is a guest review by Carleen Tibbetts.

I could easily and happily blame Richard Linklater for making me believe in destiny, fate, kismet, or the idea of a soul mate. When Before Sunrise was released, I was twelve or thirteen. I remember getting it from the video store with my best friend when we had one of our regular sleepovers. I sat there, greasy-and-brace-faced, completely swindled by the words that tumbled out of Ethan Hawke’s crooked mouth. I wondered if any of the boys whose names I drew on my notebooks or the sides of my Converse One-Stars would ever feel the way about me that Ethan Hawke felt about Julie Delpy.

Before Sunrise follows two seemingly idealistic twenty-somethings who meet by chance while abroad. They impulsively decide to spend a day and night together wandering the streets of Vienna and end up falling hard and fast for each other. The film opens on a train with a middle-aged couple quarreling in German. Celine (Julie Delpy), fed up with their arguing, moves seats across from Jesse (Ethan Hawke), and they soon become distracted by each other. Celine tells him that as couples grow older, they lose the ability to hear one another, which is ironic because the movie is nearly non-stop dialogue between Jesse and Celine.

There’s no denying the physical and intellectual chemistry between them. Not wanting the experience to end, Jesse convinces Celine to join him in Vienna by telling her she’ll look back on her life as an older, married woman and regret not taking a chance on him. She agrees. They tell the first people they meet that they’re on their honeymoon, and the further we get into the film and the more they reveal themselves layer by layer to each other, the more believable this becomes. They seem so oddly at ease with each other, it seems so effortless, so meant to be . . . the first time I watched it, I wondered whether they were going to spontaneously get married. Now, given my own experiences with missed connections, what-if’s, and horrendous timing, the romantic in me wants to yell, “Do you think it can get any better than this? What are you waiting for; start your forever now!”

In one adorable scene, Jesse and Celine pretend to call their close friends and describe the experience of meeting each other to them:

Not everything is coming up roses, though. For all the charming scenes involving carnival kisses at sunset, gypsy fortune tellers telling them they are stardust, and street poets composing impromptu verse for them, Celine and Jesse exhibit a fair amount of bitterness and cynicism. It becomes harder to tell who is more jaded. Jesse thinks love is a selfish escape for those who don’t know how to be or can’t be alone. Celine believes everything that we as humans do in life is a way to be loved more, yet she is the one wants to be rational and adult about everything. She’s the one who keeps trying to put the brakes on this thing to keep it from going anywhere. She thinks it’s foolish for them to think they’re going to see each other again and doesn’t want to ruin the magic of the night by allowing it to blossom into a relationship she believes would fizzle and disappoint. She’s totally downplaying her level of emotional investment. Perhaps it’s a defense mechanism in which Celine overcompensates and protects herself from possible heartache by appearing as detached as possible. They agree not to project any delusions of a future together, get their goodbyes out of the way so it will be less painful to part in the morning, and toast their “one and only night together.”

Celine reveals she decided to sleep with Jesse when she got off the train with him, but that it would probably be too painful for her, and she doesn’t want to just be some one-night stand. She says she can’t help it, “maybe it’s a female thing.” In another wildly romantic outpouring, Jesse tells Celine if he had the choice of not seeing her again, or marrying her on the spot, he’d marry her, because “People have gotten married for a lot less.” Whether or not we’re willing to admit it to ourselves, as women, some part of us, no matter how small, wants to hear these things and feel this special to someone. Regardless of Jesse’s sincerity, Celine gives in to his gushing sentimentality. They grope and kiss, and the next thing we see is the bluing sky that signifies their time together coming to a close.

Celine and Jesse in Before Sunrise

Jesse and Celine scrap the idea that never seeing each other again is the way to play this. They plan to meet in exactly six months at the train station to see if they can pick up with the same intensity with which they left off. The film closes with ghostly daytime shots of all the places that were bustling when they’d visited the night before, with each of them in transit, lost in reflection, looking six months into the future.

Jesse and Celine’s story doesn’t end here or sixth months from that night. Flash forward nine years to 2004’s Before Sunset (which I saw in the theater as a twenty-one year old, and it continued to delude me). Jesse is now a married writer in Paris on the final stop of a book tour promoting his novel about the night he spent with Celine. His readers demand to know whether the characters meet in six months as they’d promised, and as Jesse answers that “time is a lie,” he glances out the window and sees Celine looking in on his reading. Jesse wants to catch up, but, again, there is limited time as he’s got to get to the airport in a matter of hours.

They begin walking the streets of Paris and address the burning question: just what the hell happened at that train station six months later? Celine asks Jesse if he showed, and at first he brushes it off, claiming he didn’t. Yet when she tells him her grandmother’s death prevented her from going, he admits he was there, looking everywhere for her. If only Craigslist’s missed connections was around in the mid-90’s! They discover they lost yet another chance to rekindle their relationship when Celine tells Jesse she lived in New York for several years, minutes away from him.

Julie Delpy as Celine and Ethan Hawke as Jesse

Everything boils down to timing and circumstance. Jesse and Celine are both off the market. Jesse is stagnating in a passionless, joyless marriage he endures for the sake of his son. He confesses that he could not stop thinking about Celine leading up to the wedding, and that he thought he actually saw her in New York on the day he got married blocks away, as it turns out, from where she lived. Celine’s boyfriend is conveniently away the majority of the time, which works in her favor because she can’t easily move on or fully replace someone.

It’s clear that neither Jesse nor Celine have moved on and that those mere hours together ruined them for their subsequent lovers. Earlier, Jesse admitted that he wrote the book as a confirmation that he was able to love someone that deeply, that his connection with Celine was honest and real, and that he also wrote it in the hopes that she’d read it and they’d be able to find each other again. He admits he’s haunted by dreams of her rushing past him on a train in an endless loop, or her lying in bed pregnant next to him, and twists the knife a little deeper by telling Celine she will make a great mother someday.

Angered to the point of tears, Celine tells Jesse, “You come to Paris all romantic and married—fuck you!” His book allowed painful memories to rush to the surface, memories she’d worked hard to suppress. She used up her idealism and romanticism that one night, and it robbed her of the ability to open herself up that way again. The let down after their six-month no-show left her cold, numb, and unwilling to put effort into her subsequent relationships. He insists before he leaves that she play him one song she’s written, which she does, a song expressly about their night together:

Perhaps it’s that immediacy that comes with age Jesse and Celine discussed earlier, and the realization that they lost what could have been many happy years together that lead them to give it another shot. The film closes with Celine impersonating Nina Simone, saying, “Baby, you are gonna miss that plane,” Jesse admitting, “I know,” and the slow fade as he watches her dance, knowing he’s home already:

Fortunately (or, maybe unfortunately), the third installment, Before Midnight, is already in theaters and picks up another nine years later with Jesse and Celine married with children of their own:

Carleen Tibbetts lives in Oakland. Her poems and reviews have appeared in various journals including Word Riot, kill author, Monkeybicycle, Metazen, Coconut, H_NGM_N, Horse Less Press, and other sites.