I'm becoming the age of the people in Before Midnight

I’ve realised I’m becoming the age of the people in Before Midnight.

That feels slightly strange to write. The Before trilogy has been one of my favourite pieces of filmmaking for years, and I think I’m only now starting to understand why it has stayed with me.

Life in the future tense

When I first watched Before Sunrise, Jesse and Céline felt like people standing in front of an almost unlimited number of possible lives.

They meet. They walk around Vienna. They talk about relationships, parents, work, death, what they believe and who they might become.

That’s the luxury of being young. You can talk about life largely in the future tense. What will I do? Who will I become? Where will I live? Who will I be with?

Then Before Sunset catches them nine years later, and life has supplied some answers. Not necessarily the answers they wanted.

Some possibilities became choices. Some choices became consequences. Some things never happened. Some things happened precisely because other things didn’t.

What makes the second film so powerful isn’t simply that they’re older. It’s that the first conversation is still there. They are comparing who they became with who they thought they might become.

I’ve always loved that film. I’m beginning to think I understand it differently now, because I’m increasingly doing the same thing.

Before Midnight territory

Grey hairs appearing. My son starting secondary school.

Thinking about where work goes next rather than simply what the next job might be. Thinking much more seriously about Thailand, and whether one day life might be divided differently between there and the UK. Building Editorial Intelligence and wondering whether it’s a fascinating project I’ve created for myself or the beginning of something I haven’t quite understood yet.

Trying to stay fit enough to box, play football and move properly, rather than assuming my body will simply continue cooperating forever.

Thinking about family. Thinking about people who aren’t here anymore. Thinking about time.

Nothing particularly dramatic has happened to trigger any of this. Maybe it’s just what this stage of life feels like.

The interesting question stops being what could I become? It becomes: given everything that has happened so far, what do I want to do with the next part?

I don’t find that depressing. In some ways it feels more interesting, because I have more material now. Journalism. Years of writing. Good jobs and bad ones. Things I believed about work that I don’t believe anymore. Marriage. Fatherhood. Living between two cultures. Loss. Stress. Mistakes. A lot of things I learned the slow way.

Nobody works it all out

I wrote recently that the problems don’t get easier as you get older, and that what changes is your capacity to carry them. That idea came from these films.

The trilogy is unusually honest about it. Relationships don’t become simple. Work doesn’t resolve itself. Nobody acquires perfect emotional intelligence at forty. Life keeps introducing new complications, and there is no point at which you finally work everything out.

Before Midnight is uncomfortable for a more specific reason, though. Jesse and Céline now have what their younger selves were looking for. They found each other. They built a life.

And that doesn’t end the story. It creates a completely different set of problems.

The parallel is more direct than I first realised.

I’ve been married for two and a half years. She’s the love of my life, and before her I don’t think I had ever really had that, which is probably the honest reason the first two films land for me at all. They are about two people who haven’t got it and can’t stop circling the fact.

Jesse and Céline meet on a train in Vienna. We matched on Tinder during Covid, across a closed border, which is considerably less cinematic. Then I went to Thailand to spend some time there, and it developed from that.

And a lot of it was built through a screen. Messages and video calls, across a time difference, for a long stretch before any of it resembled a shared life.

That may be the biggest difference of all, because the films run entirely on the scarcity of contact. Jesse and Céline agree to meet again months later without exchanging any way of reaching one another, and the trilogy hangs on how easily two people could simply lose each other. Nine years pass. The premise barely survives contact with a smartphone.

Ours worked the other way around. The distance was constant, and so was the contact. A very modern sort of relationship, held together by precisely the thing those films could not imagine.

What followed wasn’t romantic in the slightest. Bringing my wife and her son to the UK meant visa applications, income thresholds, proof of a job and a great deal of money. The obstacle in those films is timing and nerve. The obstacle in an actual cross-border relationship is usually a fee, a form and the question of whether you earn enough to be permitted to live with the person you married. It’s a version of the same argument I made about who gets included in the word we, except this time it was my own paperwork.

I should be honest about the advantages I had going in. My parents are Thai and I hold a Thai passport. I knew the country, I could get there easily, and I understood enough of the culture not to be starting from nothing. Plenty of couples have none of that and meet exactly the same forms, fees and thresholds. If it is this expensive and this slow with every advantage on your side, the difficulty belongs to the system rather than to my particular circumstances.

She moved countries and built a life here. She did the harder half of it by a distance.

Which puts us at the stage the third film is about. Not looking for the thing. Having it, and working out how to keep it.

That’s a far more interesting idea about adulthood than “find the thing that makes you happy”. Eventually you have to maintain what you’ve built. Relationships. Family. Health. Friendships. A career. A sense of yourself. And you have to work out which parts still fit and which need to change.

You don’t start the next stage from a blank page

Maybe that’s why I’m thinking so much at the moment.

I’m not looking at my life thinking I need to tear it down and start again. Quite the opposite: there’s a lot I want to keep. But I also don’t want to wake up ten years from now and realise I treated the next decade as something that simply happened to me.

That’s partly why I’ve been building Editorial Intelligence. It’s why I’m experimenting so much with AI. It’s why Thailand keeps appearing in my thinking about the future. It’s probably even why I’ve become more serious about boxing, yoga and looking after myself.

They’re all versions of the same question. What do I want the next stage to look like?

And strangely, this is where the films connect with something I’ve been arguing about professionally.

You don’t enter the next stage from a blank page. You bring the previous conversations with you. What you thought. What happened. What you learned. What you got wrong. What you’re still unsure about.

That’s context. I’ve argued that in organisations context behaves more like capital than archive. It’s probably more true of a life than of a company, and considerably harder to maintain.

Before Sunrise is about possibility. Before Sunset is about what happened to those possibilities. Before Midnight is about something harder.

You’ve built a life. Now what do you do with it?

I’m increasingly interested in that question.