Cinema's most unlikely franchise returns with a look at the dark side of romance. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

You know how The Fast and the Furious is the franchise no one saw coming? Well, director Richard Linklater's brainy and shamelessly romantic Before films are now a trilogy - and in contention for title of cinema's least likely film series. Eighteen years ago (!) in Before Sunrise, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Cline (Julie Delpy) met on the train to Vienna, spent a memorable day together and parted ways. If you wondered what happened to them, nine years later they reunited in Paris, in Before Sunset, when he was on a book tour and kinda sorta rekindled their romance, thorny as their lives had become. If you wonder what happened since, Before Midnight has those answers, ugly as they may be.

Linklater (who, personally, hasn't really topped Dazed and Confused) has stayed true to his walk-and-talk life musings in this third outing, tracking the continued course of Jesse and Cline's verbose relationship, but has incorporated a few new elements into the mix. Most prominent is the lack of a time limit that added a degree of romantic suspense to the first two films. Jesse and Cline are in a long-term relationship, with twin girls to show for it. The saga picks up with the family vacationing in Greece. After Jesse sees his son from his first failed marriage off at the airport and they join a spirited dinner with friends at a plush villa. The other guests include a young couple still in thrall to the newness of their romance, a middle-aged couple that have fallen into a pattern of comfortable compromise and two elderly friends, widow and widower. In other words, Jesse and Cline's past, present and future.

The stroll through the old town and a stay at a seaside hotel afterwards are where the current reality of Jesse and Cline's partnership is revealed. No longer bright-eyed students or thirtysomethings embarking on new and exciting careers, Jesse is concerned about missing out on his son's teen years, which Cline reads as a request to move back to Chicago. His admission opens a Pandora's Box of resentment, fear, disappointment and honest revelations that reshape how we see the pair as well as how they see each other. Before Midnight veers into some bitter territory heretofore unseen in the films ("You are no Henry Miller on any level."), but in taking a dark turn to the prosaic, the film strikes a relevant chord. That Delpy and Hawke have a believable, live-in dynamic helps immeasurably. The way the emotional pendulum swings wildly from the verge of accusatory rage to private laughter is a testament to both actors and their thorough understanding of the characters (which they had a hand in writing).

If Before Midnight suffers from any flaws, the most glaring is its overall pretentiousness and elitism. Jesse and Cline are, fundamentally, flaky, affluent, artsy types with careers in humanities and environmental NGOs. They are distanced and differentiated from most of us by their erudite circle of friends, glamorous jobs and highbrow philosophical dinner conversation. These are not people who have to choose between paying the mortgage on time and feeding their kids. But it's hard to hold something against the film that Linklater and Co never pretended to be otherwise. Like its predecessors, Before Midnight strikes a fine balance between fantasy (Vienna! Paris! The Greek Islands!) and reality that ultimately is relatable, and sits at the heart of why we keep coming back to check up on Jesse and Cline's grand, deep, complex, messy love life. Before Dawn in 2022 anyone?

Before Midnight opened in Hong Kong on Thursday.

(HK Edition 09/06/2013 page7)