Before Nightfall1 is the third and final film in a trilogy linked by a thread that turns words into a paradoxical ode to matters of love in the comedy of the sexes.
Céline and Jesse are in a hotel room in Greece. The fires of their mutual enjoyment do not find them so alone. They begin with words of love, where the body has not yet been touched.
She walks towards a window and draws back the curtain that covers it. A regretful sigh falls like lightning, breaking the silence. It is the voice of the mother who lives within her who speaks: "I miss the girls." Jesse emphasises that he "doesn't," and walks straight towards the curve of her breasts. He takes her hand and, on the bedside, waiting, he lets her know that "the only view" that interests him is that little piece of her, as an object.
Lying on his wife's body, Jesse's lips caress her white nakedness, weaving the illusion of complete closeness and seclusion in that intimacy, until she stops and says: "I hadn't realised until now, you no longer have your red beard, it was one of the things that drove me crazy about you."
The "red beard" operates as a sign of jouissance that falls away and loses its function of sustaining desire in Céline. She then detaches herself from his fantasy, making it clear that between a man and a woman there is no such mountain chalet.2 The emergence of the memory of the ruddiness in her daughters' eyelashes compels her to enjoy privation, that which must be missing there in order to condescend to jouissance with a man, reminding us that "between man and woman is the sinthome."3
The repetition reveals the rhythm of Céline's phantom: "I want it so much that I don't think I'll be able to sleep… fuck, sleep, wake up again, fuck," she says.
The interruption of a phone call captures her again as a mother. She runs out exclaiming, "I hope the girls are okay!"
Back in bed, an argument ignites phallic hell. It is not the maternal instinct that Céline alleges, but the structural lack that makes the encounter between these two, who do not make one, unnatural, an index of the sexual non-relation.
That's when they get out of bed. They sit on a sofa. The tension rises. They talk and talk. They are caught in a tornado of words that, through history, meaning, and ghosts, attempts to suture the hole, believing that there can be dialogue between one sex and the other, when it is nothing more than "a dirty mess."4
Céline reminds Jesse that, before, "women wandered eternally in the vast garden of sacrifice," adding emphatically, "it's over!" She tries fantasmatically to secure her autonomy of jouissance, not giving in to Jesse's script. But he insists and believes he can arrive at a calm and rational conversation. He asks Céline if she really listens to herself when she speaks and, exhausted, defines her as the "queen of madwomen," a moment of his fantasmatic hesitation, exclaiming: "Shit!"
Thus, a saying by Céline, spoken with grace and lucidity, reveals to us that there is no mountain chalet, hotel room, or Greek stage that can prevent the essential, which is that between a man and a woman there is, inevitably: "Oh, blah, blah, blah!"
[1] Linklater, R. (Director), Before Midnight (2013).
[2] Lacan, J., Le Séminaire, livre XV: L'Acte psychanalytique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Seuil, 2024).
[3] Miller, J.-A., El partenaire-síntoma, Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2011, p. 408.
[4] Lacan, J., Séminaire XXI, "Les non-dupes errent," lesson of 15 January 1974, unpublished.
