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Like the characters, I was 32 when Before Sunset came out, and like Jesse, I was a writer living in New York City. I rented the movie and watched it with my lovely wife Cassandra in our tiny apartment. It would be foolish of me to admit exactly what I was thinking about while watching the most romantic American film ever made. (People who like the Before series say things like "American film.") The most I will say is that I was once dumped by a college girlfriend who was very smart and very dramatic and, to my great shock and thrill, proclaimed her love to me years later. She agreed to leave her boyfriend, and I sat for six hours waiting for her outside a coffee shop. She never showed up, just as Celine didn't. I will admit that I thought that Jesse and Celine were screwed. That projecting all those qualities onto someone you met once, nine years ago, was sure to cause irrevocable disappointment. Curled up with Cassandra in our apartment, I happily realized that Jesse and Celine weren't really in love. The brilliance of Before Sunset is that not only is the movie aware of it, but the characters are too.
Or so I thought. If I had known anything about Before Midnight before seeing it, I wouldn't have gasped when we find out that Jesse and Celine are still together, with twins. These were not people who should actually be together; these were the stars of the world's greatest romance. Not that being married and having kids can't be romantic, but let's just say that Romeo and Juliet didn't end with arguing over who agreed to pick up Li'l Romeo from soccer practice.
Jesse and I are still writers, and he's still way more successful than I am. Jesse and Celine are on vacation in Greece and still have philosophical conversations, but the big fight in Before Midnight--and it might be the greatest fight between a couple in an American film--is the same fight we all have. When Jesse and Celine first meet, they joke about the horrible argument a couple is having in front of them. Now they're having it.
It would be foolish of me to admit exactly what I relate to in that fight. I will say I've said and heard and thought many of those same fighting words. Jesse and Celine struggle heroically to remember that what they now find annoying about each other is what they once found endearing. They engage in the tiny acts of bravery--risking rejection, telling the truth and suppressing pride--that are the only ways to keep a relationship. When you're 41, there's far more romance in whether a couple will stay together than in whether they will get together.
Meeting the creators of something you love is never smart, because you've projected so much of your own experience onto their work. And fans make terrible journalists, since fans always want to talk more than they want to listen. So I'm not at my best when I meet Hawke, Delpy and Linklater at a Greek restaurant in midtown Manhattan and immediately find out that--unlike me--they had always assumed that Jesse and Celine would stay together. For six months, they worked on a version of Before Midnight that chronicled a day of their lives in San Francisco: they shop, look after the kids and don't talk to each other until the last 15 minutes of the movie. "Then we realized it's not that interesting," Hawke says. "We didn't want it to be a movie about how being 40 sucks."