When the camera's gaze attempts to listen rather than just show

Last night J and I went to see Richard Linklater's latest (or last) installment about the lives of Céline and Jesse, the two who met on a train from Budapest to Viena almost twenty years ago. Before Midnight is set in Greece, but just enough of the Greek island's natural splendor is exploited. As it was with the first two films, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the location of the sequel's sequel can be considered relatively incidental as what transpires between the two characters could easily happen in South America, Asia, anywhere except, perhaps, home. 

The camera's gaze expresses that as it produces, for the most part, medium-shots of the two protagonists as they drive from the airport back to their summer vacation residence, or sit at the dinner table, or walk with an aimless air to the island's downtown area to stay in a hotel, courtesy of a couple friend who has also volunteered to babysit Céline's and Jesse's twin daughters. The camera lens offers a small number of panoramic shots, evoking the movie's resistance to situate Céline and Jesse in a grand, neatly configured narrative of love and success, or love and failure. In the life of this couple, love, success, and failure coexist to fuel their relationship with gravitas as well as self-mockery, a particular combination that affords these fictional characters the kind of singularity that is proving ever so rare in cinematic figures today. 

Despite the many years they have been together, their daughters and undeniable compatibility, their relationship emerges precarious, certainly unstable at times, but inevitable at the same time. Céline's and Jesse's domestic partnership rises and plummets as quickly as their wit's velocity. At once paradoxical and delightful, the precarity of their relationship is demonstrated by a steady abundance of words. If the film's location does not seem particularly significant, the many words that fill the film remain as purposeful as they were in the first two films. In Linklater's trilogy dialogues compose and conduct the fluid unfolding of the films. With unflinching accuracy, they deploy words against each other as their most harmful weapons. But it is precisely also words that will save them from themselves as well as rescue their relationship. 

Linklater's camera undertakes modest positions. It preserves a certain distance with the characters, and never does it produce close-ups suggestive of benign or invasive intimacy. The camera's lens frames medium shots that never antagonize the audience, most of whom, by now, have established a relationship of sort with these characters. Despite the intimacy that flares up during their conversations or sensual moments, the camera's position medium-distance position, which almost takes the point of view of the audience, manifests a tacit invitation to viewers rather than recreate the impression of intrusion. Our familiarity with Céline and Jesse, solidified in the body of two films, entitles us to want to know more. Linklater's unobtrusive camera materializes such an invitation to an audience who is already more prepared to sympathize than judge. 

As I said above, the medium shots in this case suggest that the camera has assumed the audience's point of view, and thus stresses more the position of the viewer than that of the director. There are few over the angel shots, long shots, long pans, close-ups, or lower angle shots. The suggestion is reinforced by the fact that rarely does the camera's gaze adopt either Céline's subjective position or Jesse's, or make conspicuous the intrusion of the camera's lens, particularly given the intimacy governing many of the scenes. 

In other words, the camera's movements do not nudge the viewer to side with either character, but rather adumbrate the position of a witnessing companion that remains neither intrusive nor disinterested. Expressing restraint, the medium-shot recreates a distance between the camera's lens and the characters that mimics the distance between Céline and Jesse and the audience. The medium-shot distance ensures a level of caring between the audience and the characters, caring that never becomes uncritical identification. 

On two brief occasions, the camera generates a short and limited panning that shows in a slow vertical movement the walking characters' legs. The first shot of this kind happens early in the film, when Jesse appears with his son in the airport, both getting ready to part ways with each other after six weeks of vacationing together. Hank is returning to his mom in Chicago, and the pain such a separation incites is plainly pasted on Jesse's face.

The second limited panning of the characters' legs focuses on Céline and Jesse as they are walking toward the island's center to spend one intimate night of rekindled romance, without the twins, in a hotel room    

[More will follow.]