Couples' Fight Club!
Before Midnight (and After)
Written by: Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Richard Linklater
Starring: Julie Delpy (Celine) and Ethan Hawke (Jesse)
Directed by: Richard Linklater
Attention readers!
This summer on the Ms. Wonderful Film Club Blog is a focus on examining the journey of the masculine in society through the career of actor Ethan Hawke. It is Hawke Summer! (Mostly, this is because I was so moved by him directing a new film Wildcat and demonstrating a loving father-daughter relationship.)
Before Midnight is the third movie in a trilogy directed by Richard Linklater. The trilogy began in 1995, with Before Sunrise, where Jesse and Celine meet as strangers on a Vienna train and have a romantic interlude. In 2004, Before Sunset was released, showing the same two people meeting again in a different city, catching up about their lives. The trilogy ends with Before Midnight, in 2013, where the characters are partnered together and dealing with domestic responsibilities, which is a lot less romantic.
The Philadelphia Film Society is showing these films this summer. Learn more on their website here.
And another thing, Creatives!
I am hoping to foster community around themes in film in our modern age, as opportunities for connection, clarity about relationships in our lives, and as a creative outlet. I hope it can also attract more creative women to film. Please come to the first Ms. Wonderful Film Club event on August 4th in Philadelphia, or contact me directly if you’d like to be involved in some of the themes, community events, and movies we watch going forward!
Now for this week’s Movie Love Letter….
Dear Director Richard Linklater,
I love this movie, Before Midnight. I love the way it says, “Hey everyone. You love romance and stuff? Okay, cool. Now let’s go on this journey of what things look like when they ‘work out’ and there is a ‘happily ever after.’ The part after the fairytale ends. Heh heh.”
And it is involves 60 minutes or so of watching a man and woman fight. It is great!
I watched this film in the theater when it first came out a decade ago, and I was still married then to a man who I fought with, a lot. After the movie was over, I was kind of stunned and speechless. He and I went out for Indian food and we talked about the movie, but mostly I didn’t want to talk. I was just stunned by the accuracy of the thing. And when I watched, what stuck with me so deeply was the pain of Jesse in the initial scene, where he is sending his son back to the U.S. after spending only a summer with him. I was not divorced back then, and I saw my kids everyday. But the thread that runs through the “Before” trilogy that always hit me the hardest was the way Ethan Hawke played the character of a dad who was unhappy in his marriage, but never wanted to leave his kid. So here he is, having to send his kid back to his mom and settle for a meager relationship with him, when he wanted an entire childhood to spend with his son. That was at least what he signed up for when he got married, but it isn’t how all marriages and divorces go.
I’ll be honest, I am annoyed by the character of Celine. As a woman, I have been trying to figure out why I am so frustrated by Celine in this film. I was also frustrated with Nicole Barber (played by Scarlett Johansson) in A Marriage Story. These are women who are sort of giving voice to my plight as a 21st century woman/feminist/whatever, and why am I feeling more for the men in these films? Am I more like a man or something? Why do the men seem more balanced and reasonable to me? Why do I feel more love and heartbreak and compassion for the men and not for the women, even though I can understand the woman’s point of view?
I don’t know. Maybe movies are cathartic, and they are how we step outside of ourselves and see and hear another angle. God knows I was similar to Celine in my marriage. You know what it is, about being this 21st century educated middle-class, or upper-middle-class white woman, and being married with children? It is such a relatively new dynamic to “have it all,” that you don’t know how to fill the role. And it is a tall order that most of us can’t fill, and we don’t quite have enough predecessors or role models to look up to in helping us figure out a healthy balance. We’re smart, so we don’t want to stay home. We want to stay youthful and pretty, but we’re exhausted because we’re trying to establish ourselves professionally. We want the best for our kids, but we can’t give them all of ourselves because we are spread too thin, and then we feel guilty about that. It just feels impossible, and so we erupt. We erupt on the men in our lives.
Well, not all of us erupt. I erupted quite a few times. Celine certainly erupts. Jesse and the other dudes are just like, “Can we talk rationally for a moment?”
And stepping back, yes, what Jesse says is rational and balanced, and he’s not putting anything on his partner, trying to make her solve his problems or figure things out. He is just feeling things, and he clearly loves her unconditionally, and that is beautiful. The problem, I think, is that Celine doesn’t really love herself, and she doesn’t know how to take care of herself. The culture doesn’t really teach women how to do this. Loving yourself as a woman breeds jealousy and negativity, and even fear from people, even when you are kind. And women can feel that, so then they discount that self-love and resort to blaming and shaming themselves and putting themselves under impossible pressures, or making sacrifices and feeling resentful about their sacrifices. I think if Celine had enough space and time away from her family, rather than trying to do so much and accomplish so much, and “show the world” who she is and what she is capable of—MOTHER! AND PARTNER! AND VISIONARY! AND HOT-STUFF!—then she could probably just say, “I need a holiday, and I need it all by myself, and you take care of everything for a while, and I’ll see you in a month or two.”
Women don’t take this much-needed time for themselves to process and be people, because they are so consumed by their relational roles in life. Yet if they could be brave enough to know and ask for this time, and their partner could support them in having it, without calling every 5 minutes and asking questions about how to do stuff in the house—then women would come back refreshed, their love-cups full, and ready to nurture in the way they like to.
Perhaps I’m right? Perhaps I’m right.
This film feels more tailored to Jesse as its center. I am okay with that. You may not have intended that, Mr. Richard Linklater, but Jesse does feel like the main character, and perhaps being a male director, you gear your audience toward your own experience as a man. (This may be why I felt similar in watching A Marriage Story as well, directed by Noah Baumbach.) I wonder if I watched a film about the struggles of a long-term satisfying domestic partnership developed and directed by a woman director, such as Sofia Coppola, or Gina Prince-Bythewood, or the late Nora Ephron, or Raven Jackson, or Amy Heckerling, or Ava DuVernay, or Nicole Holofcener, I would feel differently as an audience member. It’s quite possible I would, but I also appreciate the opportunity to hear a dad’s point of view on screen so that I can better empathize with the plights of both genders.
What I will share is that the film is very well-done, and so beautifully acted, and so accurate about the struggles of marriage and parenting in the modern day, that it is clear the writers have gone through this tricky partnership/co-parenting journey. We as viewers like to know the big-wigs on the big-screens get it, you know?
Also, I can share that as a woman who used to really bubble up with ire in my domestic situation, because I couldn’t find myself, is that women need time to find themselves. Some women may never want to be away from their family members, because being alone is scary for them. Their identity is wrapped up in what they mean to other people. But independent, intelligent, sensitive, intuitive and creative women (who are from France? Or wish they were from France?) need time to process their feelings and emotions. They need to release expectations upon themselves, and have fewer double standards to contend with in society at large. They need other women, and hopefully great gay men, to talk to so they do not turn only to their husbands/partners with their problems. They need mystery, and distance, and their own secrets, in order to feel like full, whole people.
While it may be challenging for men to be single and alone for too long, women can often thrive being single and alone. They have cats, after all! And there are so many dance groups they can join, and reading clubs, and yoga classes, people with whom they can vent and be angry, with no consequence.
I think ideally, Celine just needed a week or two in Greece on her own, and then she could have returned to Jesse and her daughters refreshed, and alive, and able to manage everything.
That’s my opinion, based on my life experience. I do have to hand it to Ethan Hawke here in capturing a man’s struggle in a domesticated partnership, with a former spouse and child, in articulating the emotional acrobatics one has to do. Not many men can articulate their feelings in such a manner, and men don’t have the same kind of outlets to express their own emotions and journeys. That is not societally accepted for the “tough guy.” Yet men need this outlet, too. And if Jesse had men he could turn to as a support system, and the romantic partnership/nuclear family was not at the center of our Judeo-Christian paradigm, perhaps he would have the internal space to just listen to Celine without judgement or reaction. Perhaps he would be able to say, with sincerity, “I feel that. I hear you. Tell me if there is something I can do to better.”
Once she is heard, and felt—and she feels felt—she will release a lot of the ire, and probably ask him for something relatively simple, that he can do. Then they can make love.
I’m not Esther Perel or anything, but life teaches you stuff. Meditation, inward searching, going against the grain to find your passion and your truth…these things are better than any drug.
And regarding your new film, Hit Man? I’m not going to get into it with you. You Texas men are just wild.
Namaste,
Ms. Wonderful
P.S. Julie Delpy, I cherish you.
Next week: A Posting and a Podcast with a Mr. Wonderful for the 1998 film Great Expectations. Literature is so lovely!