Richard Linklater's "Before Sunrise" was the most deliciously romantic film of the 1990s. A young, devilishly handsome Jesse (Ethan Hawke) meets bohemian beauty Celine (Julie Delpy) while both are on a train bumming around Europe; he talks her into spending a day with him in Vienna, and the next 90 minutes capture the rush of falling in love like few films have. The ending had Jesse and Celine promise, although heading off to separate continents in a pre-email world, that they would meet again six months later in the same spot.
Linklater's latest, "Before Midnight," has Jesse and Celine, now married with kids and more than a few worry lines, at a dinner party on an idyllic Greek coast where they're asked how they met. He describes their day in Vienna, to which someone sighs "how romantic!" only for Celine to blurt out "Not really!" If "Before Sunrise" captured all the fairy-tale hopes of one's 20s, then "Before Midnight" welcomes you to the graveyard of all illusion called your 40s.
Jesse and Celine — who finally got together a decade after they first met in the equally romantic and hopeful sequel "Before Sunset" — are now like so many married couples: stressed out by parenting, by the complication of kids from a previous marriage (his), by competing career trajectories, by all the demands of middle age. Worse, they are showing the traits of a failing relationship: They bicker, they make jokes about each other that aren't really jokes, she airs all their dirty laundry in public, he pees with the door open, she takes cellphone calls while they're trying to get it on.
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