Before Midnight 2013
Nine years after the conclusion of Before Sunset, Jesse and Celine are a couple and parents to twin girls conceived when they got together. Jesse is also struggling to maintain his relationship with his teenage son, Hank, who lives in Chicago with Jesse’s (now) ex-wife and who, after spending the summer with Jesse and Celine on the Greek Peloponnese peninsula, is being dropped off at the airport to fly home. Jesse has continued to find success as a novelist, while Celine is at a career crossroads, considering a job in the government.
Linklater, Hawke, and Delpy all had suggested the possibility of a sequel to Before Sunset. In a video interview in November 2011, Hawke said that he, Delpy and Linklater “have been talking a lot in the last six months. All three of us have been having similar feelings, that we’re kind of ready to revisit those characters. There’s nine years between the first two movies If we made the film next summer, it would be nine years again, so we started thinking that would be a good thing to do. So we’re going to try and write it this year.”
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In June 2012, Hawke confirmed that the sequel to Before Sunset would be filmed in summer 2012. Soon after, Delpy denied filming would take place in 2012, stating that they were still only writing the script and that filming would not take place until “sometime in the next year, year and a half.”However, in August 2012, numerous reports emerged from Messenia, Greece, that the film was in fact being shot there. When asked about the reports, this time Hawke stated that he, Delpy and Linklater were in Greece only to write the film, telling MTV News that “we’re here writing a third installment to Before Sunrise. If it works out, we’ll film it, and if it doesn’t, we won’t. It’s not really worth talking about. I’m just here developing.” However, Hawke and Delpy’s denial was proven to be a ruse when the completion of filming of the new movie, titled Before Midnight, was announced on September 5, 2012, just before the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival. Linklater later said that he aimed to take Before Midnight to a film festival in early 2013.Before Midnight premiered on January 20, 2013, at a 9:45 p.m. showing at the Ellen Eccles Theatre in Park City, Utah at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival. It was then scheduled to have its international premiere out of competition at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.The film opened to general audiences on May 24, 2013, at five theaters in New York, Los Angeles and Austin. Approximately two dozen additional theaters are scheduled for each of the following weekends, and then several dozen theaters on June 14, 2013. Full release schedule, by theater, for the first four weeks is posted on the film’s official website.
Like its two predecessors, Before Midnight has received widespread critical acclaim. The film played at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival in New York where it was given four and a half stars by Movie Room Reviews.Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 98% based on reviews from 144 critics, with an average rating of 8.8/10, with the sites consensus being “Building on the first two installments in Richard Linklater’s well-crafted Before trilogy, Before Midnight offers intelligent, powerfully acted perspectives on love, marriage, and long-term commitment.” Metacritic gives the film a score of 94 based on reviews from 40 critics, indicating “universal acclaim”.According to Total Film’s Philip Kemp, “As with its two predecessors—and with the films of French New Wave director Éric Rohmer, presiding deity of this kind of cinema—Midnight’s essentially a film about people talking. But when the talk’s this good, this absorbing and revealing and witty and true, who’s going to complain?” Kemp gave the film five out of five stars and called it a “more-than-worthy, expectations-exceeding chapter in one of modern cinema’s finest love stories. As honest, convincing, funny, intimate and natural as its predecessors.”
