It Was a Very Good Year … Thinking about ‘Before Sunrise’ and the impact of Linklater’s crafted relationships.

In 1995 I was working the midnight shift in a grocery store in Anchorage, Alaska. Some nights, no one ever came in and on holiday weekends when it was the most deserted, the workload was minimal. I was stuck working the entire Thanksgiving holiday that year and the late shift after Thanksgiving evening was like a ghost town. We had pretty much shut down all operations. The doors remained opened, the Christmas lights were up and pulsing, but I don’t recall anyone coming in.

Around 3am, I remember locking up the only open cash register and then taking a seat on a brown leather recliner in the video rental area and I opened a new copy of Before Sunrise, popped it into a VCR, made a cup of coffee and watched it from beginning to end.

Saying this film had an effect on me is an understatement. I remember watching Before Sunrise and feeling like it had woken me up from the fog of the last few years I had been trapped in. I wasn’t living like I had a dream, a direction or even felt like I had any control over life whatsoever.

Possibly, every twenty-something goes through this. The listless and directionless period every young adult has to fight through trying to define themselves. It’s probably just the question of ‘how long’ does that period last in most people’s lives? In my own, it went on far too long. Even when I woke to it and became aware, I wasn’t necessarily suddenly empowered with any new ability, or gifted with the tools to fix it. I was just aware and I needed to make changes.

Before Sunrise was a beautiful movie that I found honest, endearing and what a lot of the most spontaneous moments in real life both looked and sounded like. It was a description of moments that had previously been left uncolored. At least to me. There have been a few films that had done something similar, like Mind Walk (1990) with Sam Waterson, Liv Ullman and John Heard. But that film, as inspired as it was, was very different.

That morning, high on caffeine and sleep deprived, I quit my job and reevaluated everything I was doing and wondered deeply about everything that I hadn’t become.

I felt compelled and I knew I had to make a change. I was taking classes at the University of Alaska, Anchorage and working towards a degree in history. The semester didn’t wrap up until the second week of January, so I knew I was stuck in place for at least the next month. I had some money, a car and would survive, but I knew I had to get as far from Alaska as possible.

I once wrote about the events that surrounded leaving Alaska, but that was a handful of years previous and a different situation. That book, Fugue State, has done well for itself and I’m thankful of the letters I receive from those who’ve read it.

Over the years when Richard Linklater added new chapters to his story which he had originally drafted with Kim Krizan, I noticed it, almost without any interest, in the peripheral vision of my busy life. The continued writing of the story with every new chapter fell into the hands of Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. I had read about this change in writers before I saw the second installment and I hesitated seeing it as it struck me as problematic. An article in the Los Angeles Times worried that it would lose its allure. It would now become actors fashioning a vehicle to showcase themselves talking, rather than two writers crafting dialogue and scenes to go on a journey, make discoveries and put the viewer inside of that story as an omniscient to their own magic. I was afraid the second installment wouldn’t work and skipped the theatrical release.

By 2004, I was living in Los Angeles, writing almost everyday and even taking bit parts in movies and hiring out to develop, edit and be a part of the creative process for other screenwriters. My life had changed. I had realized my dream even if I hadn’t yet achieved it, or had a clear path to making what I did have any better. I wasn’t making a living at it yet, but I wasn’t buffing grocery-store floors, emptying trash or salting sidewalks at 3am. I was still living in a fog and heavily underwater with the real life concerns of keeping a roof over my head, eating and maintaining my marriage with a wonderful lady who I knew needed me. Being needed was probably the newest experience for me and I was at least capable enough to recognize that.

I was now a decade away from that grocery store in Anchorage, Alaska. If I saw a kinship in Jesse and what he was doing, it wasn’t a mistake.

When I sat down a few years later to watch the second installment, Before Sunset, my wife was now pregnant with our son and we were preparing to change the course of life and what we were doing. It wasn’t going to be just about the two of us anymore and my relationship was much further along and I was happy. I had decided to focus on novel writing and I had wrapped up a final screenplay for a friend and begun the first half of a novel that recently released called, Waiting for Andre. It was a story about writers and relationships. Familiar stuff. Samuel Beckett and Andre the Giant. Jesse might’ve written something literately similar and off-beat. I had also begun outlining and gathering up my old journals to write Greyhound, which was a book that would pay my bills, send me to conferences, book signings, author parties and all those things we all dream about when becoming that idealized version of a ‘famous writer.’ Or, at least the one in our heads.

Before Sunset was interesting in the fact that it told the story of Jesse’s success as a writer and how he had fallen in love with Celine and hadn’t been able to get past her. He admits in the story that he wrote the book about them and their previous one-day encounter with the express intent of trying to find her and continue his relationship with the person he thought to be his soulmate. The whole story has a magical aspect to it, it’s vibrant, moving, joyous and still has a lot of honesty all these years later and it holds up perfectly.

As an author who writes about his own life, I’ve been guilty of doing the same thing Jesse did. Looking back on the juxta-position of it now, I can only laugh, realizing I was making the same mistakes writing about the intimate relationship between myself and another person. The only difference is that in the land of make-believe, Jesse’s book was a best-seller. My own sold nominally, made some money and was well-received. Sure it has an audiobook version and available at libraries, but that all fades pretty quickly. The upside was that I was gifted with more reader letters than I was reviews, but was thankful for all of it. I never wrote any of my books in order to get the attention of the person in the book, nor as an attempt to get back involved with them like Jesse. But, even when you’re being honest about someone and portraying them over the course of 300 pages, it’s unlikely they’re going to appreciate how they’re portrayed. Even when they’re the hero. It’s a hard lesson to realize because admitting that some people would prefer complete anonymity is difficult to understand, especially if you’re a writer.

While most Linklater’s story rings true and holds on to the same fiery energy the previous film had, it opens the door on something, at least to me, quite disturbing.

In the first film, Celine jokes about being a psychopath and killing her roommate and it comes across as an off-handed quip. It’s something people say in the course of a conversation to merely add a jolt of energy and perhaps a laugh. In the second film, it revisits this disconnectedness and the lovable and sincere Delphy has now seemingly written herself as a Holden Caulfield character, who is dark, lost, unable to connect to anyone, unable to know love, feels like her ability to love was somehow ‘magically’ stolen from her by Jesse and his book — and thus begins something quite different for each of them. This is dialogue straight from her mouth, not my interpretation. Jesse believes he’s embarking on the great love of his life and his dialogue reflects this. Celine has warned him she cannot love and yet accepts him into her life, and there’s almost a you’ve been warned tone to her behaviour as she takes him in the last few minutes on a long-winding circuitous route upstairs to her apartment. Those last five minutes are like an omen of the film to come next.

When this chapter ended, I wasn’t left with the dark feelings I’ve highlighted here. I wasn’t able to see them in the eyes I have now, nor were we gifted with the very dark third act that Linklater, Delpy and Hawke would create in 2014. I’m also not the first person to highlight those shades about Before Midnight either. Most viewers came away from the third film feeling the same way. The ending of Before Sunset ended for most with very hopeful and touching tones and everyone left the theatre or stopped their DVD’s thinking that life would be what it was supposed to be for Jesse and Celine and that a third film, if it ever came, would be a family romp full of kids, problems and the juggling of life that people often have. But probably not the Hitchcockian fall-out Linklater gave us though for Act III.

Years later, here we are. It’s fall of 2019. The film has been out for five years and I’ve finally found time to sit down and dedicate myself to viewing it. When I saw it available on sale via streaming, I realized I should sit down and watch all three over the course of three early evenings. So, I did that. At 11pm on a Wednesday I fired up the first installment, Thursday night the second, and then Friday night the third.

I don’t need to highlight what’s been going on in my life in great detail for this third part. My son is now twelve years old. He went off to camp this summer two times, once at the beginning of summer, which was the first time he’d been away from us for more than a night. That was excruciating, even though he returned home telling us that he had a wonderful time and loved camp. The second camp trip was at the end of his summer and it only seemed to bother my wife as he was out on Catalina Island with the YMCA, swimming in the ocean, jumping off the pier and supposedly having a blast. She stayed awake almost every night stuck addictively watching Shark Week on Nat Geo. She said she couldn’t sleep and was worried about her little boy away at camp and the possibility that something had happened.

“Don’t worry. If anything happened, they’ll call,” I kept assuring her.

Not much happened at camp. Fox came home to report that he didn’t have a good time, he got in trouble several times for not listening, talking back and was even pushed around by another kid who everyone in his cabin was fully aware of being a bigger brat than he was. The problems of life at twelve. I knew that camp was a 50/50 scenario. Not every experience is going to positive but that it would be at least a learning experience, much like everything that happens between Celine and Jesse. It was ridiculous to think that we would drop in on them again and not see some level of dysfunction operating between the two. However, the basic premise of the tale seems to be cast aside. Two people meet up, have limited time and then try to make the most of their encounter by taking a walk to give them some space and have a chat about what’s important to them. This is not the set up any longer. The premise is broken and now we’re seeing this from the aspect of the wreckage.

In Before Midnight, whether it was intended or not, Celine is now written as a completely deranged and psychotic emotional mess and narcissistic, harassing wreck. She’s unhappy and despises Jesse on every level. As a participant, we don’t know if it’s because of her psychological personality that was just a joke in the first film and then fully developed into midlife, or if it was because of Jesse’s choice of writing about them in his bestseller which she just couldn’t get past. This is actually a real consideration and something that seems to matters to the real life writers of this movie, as it’s very direct. There’s a scene at a hotel where a young wife asks Jesse to sign a book for her as it meant everything between her and her husband. Celine rolls her eyes so hard, you wonder if it’s going to break the camera. Then she asks Celine to sign the book and you wonder if you’re about to witness a pea-soup moment from the Exorcist. Celine’s face turns almost green with disgust and you wonder if she’s going to have a screaming fit right at the counter and knife everybody in sight.

The idea that Delpy and Hawke had an honest conversation Before Writing this third installment and showing the mess that’s often entwined in real relationships is admirable. I’ve always assumed that both characters wrote their own parts. From all the cast interviews I’ve read between the three of them, that seems to be the case. This method strikes me as the best way to craft the idea that Linklater and Krizan originally begun.

Wanting to show that at times relationships can tear at one partner and yet build another, while being one-sided and a display of the worst of all of us is what drama is about. That one person is there to carry the other, like in that U2 pop song from both of these actors late teen years, is poignant, but taking it as far as they did, dismantles the storyline for no reason other than to have Celine dump all over Jesse in an endless manner all while we just wait for a reason for the spectacle. She’s like a female Van Gogh here and we wonder if she’s at breaking point and going to do something rash. I wanted to ask Delpy why this kind of hatred was necessary? It was cynical at best, troubling and sad at most. She becomes Holden Caulfield personified and even seems to venture into Mark David Chapman territory where she just wants to assassinate her other, negative version as she’s orbiting through scenes. Everything is a reason to hate Jesse, and Jesse keeps trying to find some common ground. Almost foolishly. But then you realize … it’s just one day. One day in a very long relationship that likely had many days like this, as we all have.

While it’s easy to point and say too many midlife relationships are like this, the opposite is also true. Some people’s mid-life relationships are much more fulfilling, honest and less combative than portrayed here. The one variable that seems to get people worked up about Before Midnight is the nasty, argumentative and completely disconnected nature between the couple that consumed the whole third film.

Linklater stated that these films are a Rorschach test for your own relationship, but I think that sounds almost like a cop-out in not recognizing the problems the third film had, whether intentional or not. However, all creators are cursed with this spiritual fortitude in regards to their work — as it has to stand on its own and live its own life separate from the creators. It’s now just as much ours as it was theirs when they made it, flaws, scars and all. They fought the whole way through and that’s not a test result, either.

When you read a lot of the commentary on this third film, whether it’s professional or just from the general public, everyone remarks about it creating a trilogy and how the arc wraps up the story. Even the creators have stated as much. Personally, I didn’t feel like that at all. I’ve actually been feeling like these movies are closer to seasons. Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter. Lives are actually lived like that more than a three-act melodrama. Most people usually don’t sit around long enough for the fourth act however. In Kabuki theatre, sure, that’s why they’re there. Death can be quite compelling, especially in Japanese Melodrama. Most Western mystery traditions and storyforms? Yeah, that’s a no.

It’s difficult to say if some viewers would go along for the journey again after seeing what happened in Before Midnight, but maybe a decade passing will soften that blow as well as people’s feeling’s about Celine’s internal madness. Anything is possible. Maybe these films will touch a nerve with another generation and find a way to enshrine them in their lives, too.

The next film could possibly be the last, rounding out the tale where we now deal with real loss, and not just the superficial loss of self that we see Jesse and Celine battling over in the this third act. The kind of loss that drives men to get hairplugs and corvettes, and women to do full-body cosmetic reconstruction. Death would be a drastic direction, but Jesse dealing with the loss of Celine would make sense. Celine being shown in glimpses and memories, trapped in her own full-blown rejected Van Gogh Madness, attacking her family, herself and Jesse even still. We see her where she ends up taking her life in a fit of emotional desperation. I can almost hear Frank Sinatra singing ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ in the background, setting the tempo and placing our characters in somewhere so far unseen, but expected. Maybe Alaska.

Rich Linklater might interject here and say ‘The movie opens with a close up on Jesse. His hair now as gray as puffy rain clouds over farmland. He’s reading the lyrics of ‘It Was a Very Good Year’ aloud in a book store with dramatic effect as it’s the opening of his new novel. That’s all I got so far, what do you two think?” Rich sits unblinking for a response while Hawke and Delpy pensively look on evaluating, not knowing what to say, just as they likely did with the previous two films in development.

However — It could also go the other way where Celine is now mourning the loss of Jesse after something tragic and she has to reevaluate her relationship with him over the years, the children and his ex-wife, whom we finally get to meet. She would feel the loss of him as a husband and father, the good and the bad. Both versions would be equally hard to take, but equally compelling.

Consider now that … Maybe she’s finally written her own story, and the story itself, and the loss of Jesse is the one thing that has brought her true joy. She thries off of seeing him extinguished. That might be quite fitting in consideration which then creates a second loop with her children dealing with how she writes about their father.

We could see her in several places in the film, above Jesse’s open grave, a book signing, and bobbing on a sailboat at the end, reciting lyrics from Serge Gainsbourg’s Ballad de Melody Nelson, apropos …

Ça, c’est l’histoire de (Melody Nelson) (insert: Jesse)
Qu’à par moi-même personne
N’a jamais pris dans ses bras
Ça vous étonne?
Mais c’est comme ça

I think at some point this conceived notion of mine is likely a film that will come to pass and hopefully we’ll yet see these two and their relationship once again.

My wife asked, “What’s so special about these films?”, and the answer is an easy one, at least to me.

These examples are touchstones for others about how we love each other, tear at each other, worship each other, hate each other and struggle with all of it. They’re a slice of reality to show you that you’re not alone in whatever it is you’re going through. They show you that what you have — is equally beautiful and worth protecting. And you should feel that way. Good or bad. Especially the bad.

Jesse’s overwhelming push at the end, and ‘Dad example’ of parental and unconditional love towards Celine was tear-jerking. It was what most good husbands, and wives both know. Just make it till tomorrow and whatever it is now, won’t seem so bad or feel so destructive, later. Get through it.

Even with the rough, unpaved nature of it. Midnight stands just as beautifully as the others, even though, it’s arguably the hardest pill to swallow.