With Richard Linklater's eagerly anticipated Before Midnight debuting for the lucky few at Sundance yesterday, some new stills have arrived online. Unsurprisingly, they show Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke partaking of each other's company in the Mediterranean sunshine. Body language experts may want to scrutinise the pics thoroughly and report their findings in the comments section below.
If you're new here, the thoroughly seductive first two instalments in the ongoing slacker romance follow Jesse (Hawke) and Celine (Delpy). The pair first met on a train in 1995 and joined forces for a rambling evening in Vienna in Before Sunrise. We then caught up with them nine years later when they reconnect in Paris in 2004: Jesse has written a book about their brief encounter, and Celine shows up at a signing. We left their saga with Jesse missing his plane back to the States at the end of Before Sunset, and Before Midnight picks them up in Greece another eight years on.
Immediate Twitter responses from those at the Sundance screening have been almost universally glowing, with the exception of a certain Damon Wise from a certain Empire magazine, who called it "a bit thin." The grump. No doubt he'll explain himself on the Empire blog shortly...
The film arrived at Sundance without a distribution deal in place, and despite this series not historically making enormous box office returns, they're sufficiently well-loved that most sources are predicting a lively bidding war later in the festival. Expect Before Midnight in UK cinemas sometime later this year.
