When I reviewed Richard Linklater's Before Midnight from the Sundance Film Festival in January, I went out of my way to write a review that spoiled absolutely nothing about where we found Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) in the latest installment of the series. When we last saw them in Before Sunset they had reunited in Paris, and as Jesse sat entranced by the woman he'd first met on a train in Vienna 9 years earlier, Celine teased him "Babe, you're gonna miss that plane…" Did he miss the plane? Did they stick together? Fans had waited nine years to find out, and I wasn't about to reveal it in a hastily written festival review.
But now that this first trailer, which premiered at Yahoo!, is out there, it seems safe to talk about it. Jesse and Celine are together. They have two daughters. They are spending the summer in gorgeous Greece… and as you can see, their "happily ever after" still has plenty of hurdles to clear. And that's really all we need to talk about, because even when the basic setup of the story is revealed, there are plenty of wonderful surprises in Before Midnight that everyone deserves to be able to discover on their own.
After premiering at Sundance and taking a stop at SXSW, Before Midnight is heading for a spot at the Tribeca Film Festival before opening in theaters on May 24. It's Linklater's first film since last year's criminally underrated Bernie, but more importantly, it's the latest installment of a series that we hope keeps going as long as Hawke, Linklater and Delpy are on this earth.
