I’ve just come back from seeing “Before Midnight”. I haven’t seen Linklater’s two earlier movies
that make up the trilogy. I found this one a bit heavy and it reminded
me a lot of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes
from a Marriage." Both are portraits
of marital stress with intense dialogues and close ups that verge on being claustrophobic. I often wanted the camera to pan out to give
Jesse and Celine and me more space. Mainly, I wanted Celine and Jesse to stop talking. These were tired old arguments. While I respect Linklater’s attempt to
dissect the tensions in this couple, it felt too didactic, and sometimes
contrived. He did, though, cover a slew
of relevant issues: gender stereotypes, work-career issues, cultural
differences, parenting obligations, blended families, marital fidelity,
attraction, sex and aging.
Perhaps because I see couples in distress, I desperately wanted
to slow this couple down and ask them to talk less and listen more. As someone interested in emotions, I wanted
them to notice the feelings behind the words.
When we get so caught up in the content of what we’re saying we don’t
listen for the feelings beneath the words.
We especially don’t slow ourselves down enough to hold our opinions in
check and really hear what the other person is trying to communicate.
I was particularly
struck with how this movie-long argument began and how it might have been avoided. In
couples, I don’t think any one person is to blame. I see couples as part of a system, yet just
looking at the movie’s beginning scene, I suspect if Celine had simply been
able to empathize with Jesse’s sense of sadness things would have gone
differently. Jesse was separating from
his son, Hank, who only visits in the summer, and he was feeling the loss.
Separation is hard for everyone and Hank is someone Jesse cares
about deeply. Sometimes, as it is in
this case, the disconnection is especially difficult. Jesse not only feels the sadness, but it’s
accompanied by the sense that he hasn’t spent enough time with his son. He worries that as Hank gets older he might
be needed more, and that he won’t be around to do the things dad’s are supposed
to do with their sons.
I wish Celine could have reacted differently to Jesse’s
sense of distress. I just wanted her to
let him have his sadness and regret without her being triggered to say or do
anything. Sometimes we’re called upon to
just listen and be empathetic. All of
us know times when we wish we had been available to someone whom we love, and weren’t. We don’t want to let down people we love. It’s what Jesse was feeling and trying to
express when he came up with the option of moving to America to be close to
Hank.
That obviously elicited fear in Celine. If I had been sitting with them, I would have
asked Celine to hold her concerns for a moment and just let Jesse talk about
this idea. I know this would have been
hard for her. It is hard to be quiet
when you feel something so strongly, like how this suggested move might change her
whole life. But if Celine could have
been less reactive she might not have gone to the extreme of predicting the end
of the relationship. She has some past history to guide her. She’s seen Jesse in this emotional space
before. She, in fact, comments on
it. At one level she knows he is still
processing his feelings of loss and powerlessness. We
don’t know where things might have gotten if Jesse could have fully discussed
everything he was feeling. Maybe he
would have needed to talk more of possible solutions or maybe if he had felt
permission to just be sad for a while, the feelings would have dissipated on their own. Then maybe Celine might have been able to
take a turn and talk about her relationship with Hank, and how it was hard at
first and how that’s changed: how
they’ve become closer and it’s a loss for her as well. She and Jesse could have shared this
feeling. And then she could have shared
how threatening the idea of moving felt for her and how it jeopardized their original
agreement to live in Paris. A calmer
more productive discussion could have occurred.
Unfortunately, everything got derailed as soon as Celine’s fear took
hold and she was no longer able to see how Jesse was caught in his
feelings. She saw it briefly, but as
soon as she lost sight of this and her own fear took hold we’re in an endless
loop of argument- counter argument; threat-counter threat--in other words,
we’re lost.
It is Jesse and Celine’s inherent caring and commitment to one
another, as well as their wonderful playfulness, that save the day. Being able to have fun, to be goofy and use humor
to defuse tense situations allow them to come back together. Even through their argument are sometimes
mean-spirited and harsh, they are still able to repair and recover. As much as I would have loved them to have
avoided arguing, it’s important to note their desire to move back toward one
another and to remember that in relationships the ability to repair ruptures is
an important skill to cultivate and use.
