In one of the most often quoted lines from Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy— Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013)—Céline (Julie Delpy) locates God in “the little space in between” people. The dialogue with Jesse (Ethan Hawke) in which this line appears takes place in Vienna when they first meet in Before Sunrise. For Céline, this is an intimate space, the glue that brings the bodies and souls of people together. From a generic perspective, in the Before trilogy, this “little space” seems to evoke romantic comedy, the genre of intimate protocols and short distances. But, in a different sense, this space is not so little: it expands and contracts in major ways in the course of the eighteen years that the story lasts. It is a transnational space that comprises the cities of Vienna and Paris and the region of Messenia in the Peloponnese. It includes also all the places in which the characters have lived or visited (some mentioned, some not) at least in the two nine-year intervals between the films, if not beyond them: the trilogy sparks this particular kind of imagination in spectators, who feel compelled to fill in the gaps between the three brief moments in the lives of the characters depicted by the films. In other words, Céline’s “space in between” is both intimate and transnational—in part, intimate because transnational. In this chapter, I would like to explore this intimate/transnational space in the third of the films, Before Midnight from the comic perspective offered by the trilogy and this film in particular.

The very prominent different national origins of the lovers in the trilogy—Céline French, Jesse American—have, surprisingly, gone practically unmentioned in the abundant scholarship on the films. It is as if critics had implicitly agreed on the irrelevance of this difference—reluctant, perhaps, to admit that such things matter anymore in a supposedly borderless world. However, we do not live in a borderless world and borders as well as national differences continue to matter. If anything, as Cooper and Rumford affirm, borders proliferate today more than ever before.