Before Midnight

Once the hotel sequence starts, there was a pit in my stomach that I was witnessing the collapse of the embodiment of love and possibility of love to exist in this world. That’s the power of these movies and it creeps up on you.  I know I said I couldn’t pick a favorite (the truth is my favorite of the trilogy is whichever one I’m watching) but this one is such a self aware culmination of the previous two that is realistic about love and marriage and I think shaped me in a big way when I saw this at 16.  Seeing this whole trilogy again over a decade later and deep into a 5 year relationship with my girlfriend by my side was a powerful experience. The things these three movies made us talk about were profoundly insightful and I truly believe brought us closer together.  People say these movies are a litmus test for how a relationship is going and there might be something to that. This one in particular strips the veneer of the fantasy of the first two away but doesn’t dismiss the reality of them happening—just that it can’t be that way forever. And that’s tragic and beautiful. It’s also mundane and everything in between.  Every person, I believe, should watch this trilogy at a certain age (say 17/18) and then come back to these films every decade after that—if only to see the ways in which our relationship to love and connection changes as we change, as society change, as our experiences mold us into freshly formed identities.  They say every seven years we shed our molecules and reproduce new ones in some ship of Theseus style rebranding of our identity. One of the core elements of our being is our relation to others (I truly believe that) and this trilogy is the most beautiful representation of these changing identities within the same two people across 27 years.  Just so remarkable and possibly three of the most important movies ever made.