Never say forever

MANILA, Philippines - As a child, the pursuit of happiness is a squealing “yes” that is met with a laugh or a hush; get a little older, and it is often denied, with a darker sort of glee. I cannot say whether Before Midnight makes me happy or not — just as Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s characters, back together in the third installment of director Richard Linklater’s Before… series, cannot easily say whether they are happy, whether what they have is still love.

Each of the films unfold in the breadth of a single day, or a portion of it, and the format remains unchanged since Before Sunrise in 1995 and Before Sunset in 2004. A man (Jesse) and a woman (Celine) meet up, they walk around, they talk, they talk as they walk around, and they come to a point where a decision needs to be made — all framed within Linklater’s famously meandering, unbroken shots. It is, in other words, a day where nothing and everything happens. Virginia Woolf would be proud.

Only this time around, it isn’t 20-somethings killing time in Vienna, or a pair in their 30s reunited in Paris; it’s a family holiday at a writer’s residence in Greece. The film’s trailer shows Jesse and Celine nine years older, successful in their own careers, and still together — ever since the day Celine danced like Nina Simone and Jesse missed his flight — with beautiful, golden-haired twin girls asleep in the backseat. When their friends offer to take the kids for an evening, something happens that hasn’t happened in years: they are alone.

One story

Linklater’s series isn’t so much three movies as it is one story, told in real-time, captured in three separate days. And like time, the only place to begin is at the beginning.

Before Sunrise is a reckless moment of youth, when Jesse and Celine’s tracks first converge like the train they both ride into Vienna. Trying very hard to be adults, they are serious about their ideas but careless with their time, which stretches on before them, full of infinite possibility. They fall in love, but bet their futures on a promise rather than a phone number, still believing that love will come often into their lives.

By the time I watched Sunrise, many years after its release, I was almost a 20-something, a sophomore at college, with my own ideas and open-ended trajectories. It’s a time in your life when any stimulus — movies, music or books — can affect you in ways that never really happen again. Their conversation became the standard to which I held all future relationships. Never mind compatibility — all that mattered was the connection. And in the relationship I found myself in soon after, the connection was as deep and irresistible as gravity. I’d go cross-eyed trying to understand what went on between us, that chasm, both starry sky and combat zone, where wills and words and the wordless danced and collided and sometimes missed each other entirely. Sometimes I wondered if I was seeing him, or just an idea of him; a composite of so many images imprinted on me by the stories I love. Looking back, it must have been tough for him, battling so many expectations. And yet I believed, as Celine did, that it was there, in that mysterious space between us, that magic existed.

Somewhere in between watching Before Sunrise and falling in love, I watched Before Sunset.

Golden remembrance

If Before Sunrise is flush-drunk with the future, Before Sunset looks backward, a golden remembrance limned with regret. A missed meeting, a lost fate, and years of wondering why, where and how. Until the day Jesse writes a book and Celine finds him in a bookshop in Paris. After nine long years, every word and gesture is electric. The what-could-have-been is forever lost, but as the light fades from the screen, there is a lingering glimmer of a second chance, of what-may-yet-be now that they have found each other.

In the space of a relationship, time does funny things. As if your first kiss was only yesterday, but your all-night fight feels like it will never end. That same boy I was with in the afterglow of Before Sunrise endured until we reached our own Before Sunset moment, when our what-could-have-been did battle with the what-may-yet-be. This was years later, and the plot was different — we were still with each other, and for the most part content — but stay with someone long enough and your mind starts to wander, until you wonder: is everything as it should be? It’s a point of no return that most couples go through: when you decide whether such a relationship was worth the era it defined, and whether it’s worth the one to come.

The sum weight of that decision can feel as heavy as a book in your hands, or pass by in a second like a missed flight. For me, it was a picture of what yet could be, a riddle I couldn’t seem to solve, a secret I had sworn to keep.

Nine years later

Last month, I watched Before Midnight. Nine years later for Jesse and Celine, and the conversation has changed. Still crafted by the director and actors to seem completely spontaneous — overlapping cadences, staccato bursts of insight — the change in the characters is almost imperceptible, like light from one moment to the next. It has taken on shades and shadows that weren’t there before, a shiny terrain cracked and made uneven from years of pressing two lives against each other to stay parallel.                

The little signs are there for anyone who’s been in a long-term relationship. Jesse counts the cost of his happiness when he drops off his son from his first marriage at the airport. Celine is almost neurotic trying to be all the things a woman is supposed to be today: independent, nurturing, mother, feminist. And a happy meal with friends threatens to implode from so much tension that, unsure, their friends can only laugh. When the verbal tug-of-war finally escalates into the inevitable maelstrom, flinging around the oversized debris that only a nine-year relationship can amass, I am sucked, gasping, into the dark corners of my own relationship. Isn’t this supposed to be a love story? 

In Midnight Jesse plays a game of make-believe, much like he did on the train in Sunrise when he pretended to travel to the future to persuade Celine to join him in Vienna, only this time it’s the other way round. It’s an old game of theirs, but the Before films in themselves are a kind of time travel, a big, cinematic, and long-running “What if?”

What-if moment

The idea for the first film actually came from Linklater’s own what-if moment, one long evening in Philadelphia with a girl named Amy Lehrhaupt (long deceased, to whom Midnight is dedicated). But if the film format is itself a play on time and if quantum physics says that anything that can happen does, maybe the time travel idea isn’t as pretend as you think. In another one of time’s little games, I realize that — like Linklater, Delpy/Celine and Hawke/Jesse — I am not the same person I once was. From Sunrise’s radiant optimism, now a little naïve, to the bittersweet Sunset in Paris, and finally (for now) to Midnight, in which the older filmmaking threesome have made a film that is the most mundane and most complex of all three.

Nine years is nine years is nine years: an echo in triplicate from actor to character to viewer. The beauty of this series lies in a cinematic experiment that takes place onscreen as much as it does off-screen in real life: the pursuing of life and love through the years, and watching it run its course. We are, all of us, older, and we wonder if the what-is can ever be as beautiful as the what-if.

Today, the boy that I was with is better described as a man, the nine years between Sunset and Midnight have translated into eight years in our own relationship, and, like Celine and Jess, time has rounded out edges as much as it has added on baggage — which I guess it does to all of us. The “whys” and “why nots” have collapsed in a hopeless heap over the years, leaving a silence that is comfortable as often as it is ambivalent. As I gaze upon a face that is almost as familiar as my own, sometimes I see the laughing, carefree boy I once knew, in darker times it is the one I have come to loathe, and once in a while, a complete stranger looks back at me.

I realize that I started this with a question, and that another one will end it, because the movie is in itself a question that is almost impossible to answer.

It is a question that Jesse and Celine ask, and do not quite answer, or perhaps they answer in ways that are beyond words. It is a question that we will ask ourselves again and again, with different people, and will spend the rest of our lives answering, each in our way, or a myriad of ways as inexplicable as they are inexpressible:

Do you still believe in magic?

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