000165967 001__ 165967 000165967 005__ 20260116143031.0 000165967 020__ $$a9781474493826 000165967 037__ $$aBOOK-2026-045 000165967 041__ $$aeng 000165967 100__ $$aDeleyto, Celestino$$b 000165967 245__ $$aStories So Far: Romantic Comedy and/as Space in Before Midnight 000165967 260__ $$aEdinburgh$$bEdinburgh University Press$$c2022 000165967 300__ $$a136-153 000165967 500__ $$aPostprint 000165967 506__ $$aall-rights-reserved 000165967 520__ $$aIn one of the most often quoted lines from Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy— Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013)—Céline (Julie Delpy) locates God in “the little space in between” people. The dialogue with Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in which this line appears takes place in Vienna when they first meet in Before Sunrise. For Céline, this is an intimate space, the glue that brings the bodies and souls of people together. From a generic perspective, in the Before trilogy, this “little space” seems to evoke romantic comedy, the genre of intimate protocols and short distances. But, in a different sense, this space is not so little: it expands and contracts in major ways in the course of the eighteen years that the story lasts. It is a transnational space that comprises the cities of Vienna and Paris and the region of Messenia in the Peloponnese. It includes also all the places in which the characters have lived or visited (some mentioned, some not) at least in the two nine-year intervals between the films, if not beyond them: the trilogy sparks this particular kind of imagination in spectators, who feel compelled to fill in the gaps between the three brief moments in the lives of the characters depicted by the films. In other words, Céline’s “space in between” is both intimate and transnational—in part, intimate because transnational. In this chapter, I would like to explore this intimate/transnational space in the third of the films, Before Midnight from the comic perspective offered by the trilogy and this film in particular. 000165967 540__ $$9info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess 000165967 773__ $$tReFocus: The Films of Richard Linklater 000165967 8560_ $$flplumed@unizar.es 000165967 8564_ $$uhttps://zaguan.unizar.es/record/165967/files/BOOK-2026-045.pdf$$zTexto completo 000165967 909CO $$ooai:zaguan.unizar.es:165967$$pbooks 000165967 980__ $$aBOOK$$bCAPITULOS$$b