Stories So Far: Romantic Comedy and/as Space in Before Midnight

Deleyto, Celestino

En : ReFocus: The Films of Richard Linklater
2022
Edinburgh University Press Edinburgh
ISBN: 9781474493826
Pp: 136-153

Resumen: In 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.

Nota: Postprint