MANILA, Philippines - An American father, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is seeing his son Hank (Seamus-Davey Fitzpatrick) at the Kalamata Airport in Greece. Hank is returning to his mother in the US after spending his “best summer ever†with Jesse and his family. The middle-schooler is more composed than his forty-ish father, who hovers anxiously as their separation draws near.
Geography weighs heavily on Jesse. Outside the airport, he rejoins his family: Celine (Julie Delpy) and their young twin daughters Ella and Nina (Jennifer and Charlotte Prior). As they drive through the austerely beautiful rocky hillsides of Messinia, Jesse and Celine talked about living far away from Hank, about her career as an environmentalist but hoping for a new job, and about the swirl of ancient and modern Greece around them. Jesse hints at wanting to move back to America from their home in Paris, but Celine has done her US time — they lived in New York for a spell — and has no wish to return. Their long history together bubbles between them.
Jesse is a successful novelist. They are in Greece at a writer’s retreat, staying in the bucolic country villa of an older expat writer, Patrick (Walter Lassally). Jesse has given to flights of creative fancy which charm the assembled company, warmly hospitable Greek couples, but Celine — whose own past has played a starring role in Jesse’s semi-autobiographical novels — is perhaps a bit weary of serving as alluring French muse to Jesse’s fiction career.
As a treat, their Greek friends have gifted Jesse and Celine with a night at a luxury seaside hotel while they babysit the twins. Feeling the undercurrent of friction between them, Celine wants to beg off, but their friends insist. They set off on foot through the specular countryside, meandering through meadows and villages, enjoying each other’s company, talking, teasing, debating and flirting.
What does a long-term couple do in a sleek hotel room besides throw off their worries, responsibilities and clothes and make love? But for Jesse and Celine, realities intrude: The weight of children, work, ambitions, disappointments, the ebb and flow of romantic love; the strains of an evolving, deepening relationship. Their idyllic night tests them in unexpected ways.
In Before Midnight, “They’re still talking, still making each other laugh,†says director Richard Linklater. About Jesse and Celine, the couple chronicled in Linklater’s earlier films Before Sunrise (1995) and Before Sunset (2004). “This time around, we thought the thing we really had to offer was brutal honesty about long-term commitments — just how tough it is. We had to dig into more of a domestic front, so different from the brief encounter of their 20s or the rediscovery in their 30s. It’s not the same kind of romance, yet we still think there’s something special to this couple.â€