FOUR STARS

Even if the idea of a romantic movie usually leaves you cold, if not a little nauseous, don’t dismiss Before Midnight. It’s about as far from a cliché romance as you can get.

As one of its stars, Ethan Hawke, puts it: “Most romances seem to have either a female agenda, where the guys are all dopes, or a masculine idea of what romantic love is supposed to look like, with Eva Mendes crawling across the floor in a bikini.

“What’s so wonderful about this movie is it’s kind of ‘genderless’. It’s fun to make a romantic movie that I’m not ashamed to ask my male friends to go see,” laughs the Nineties heart-throb, who, at 42, still boasts a boyish quality.

His co-star Julie Delpy agrees. “It was our goal when we did this, that it’s neither macho or feminist or man-hating,” says the 43-year-old French actress, looking chic in a black dress.

While it can be watched as a standalone movie, Before Midnight is actually the third in a series of films about Jesse and Celine, two characters who met in 1995’s Before Sunrise. In that movie, the two twenty-somethings begin chatting on a train, and impulsively disembark to spend a day and night exploring Vienna together.

It ended with the expectation they’d meet up six months later, but as the 2004 sequel reveals, that rendezvous never happened. In Before Sunset, Celine unexpectedly shows up at a Paris bookshop when Jesse inspired by their night in Vienna. Though both in relationships, they walk the Paris streets rediscovering each other, realising their bond is as enthralling as ever.

Now it’s nine years on, and Jesse, a successful author, and Celine, an environmentalist, are facing all the complexities of maintaining a long-term relationship together.

“Often in married life, it’s either some kind of cornball, whitewash thing where everybody’s OK, or it’s heavy drama — alcohol, stress, they secretly hate each other,” notes Hawke, a Texan native, who has four children — two from his first marriage to Uma Thurman and two with present wife and his children’s former nanny, Ryan.

Before Midnight opens with the Paris-based pair enjoying the summer at a writers’ retreat in Greece with their twin daughters. But while the landscape may be serene, the state of their relationship is far from it, and we soon realise geography is weighing heavily on Jesse’s mind.

Should they go to America to be near Jesse’s son? Should Celine accept a job that would keep them in France? Do they still love each other? These are the questions they ask themselves during a night at a luxury hotel, gifted to them by friends.

The night builds to a fight; one in which nasty and hurtful things are said, but while it makes uncomfortable viewing, Delpy does not see the turn of events as necessarily negative.

Before Sunset, which played out in real time, earned a best adapted screenplay Oscar nomination for Hawke, Delpy and the director Richard Linklater. The trio also co-wrote this movie and, as ever, strive to depict scenes as naturally and authentically as possible. This involved many long, uncut scenes filmed in one take.

While people might assume Delpy writes Celine’s words, Hawke writes Jesse’s lines and Linklater edits them, the truth is “there’s no part of this script that Julie or I or Rick hasn’t had our hands in”, notes Hawke, an author and director in his own right.

“The fun is you’re getting to see them warts and all,” adds the actor. “All we’ve tried to do is put three-dimensional human beings on screen, put them in a relationship and watch them age 20 years,” he says.

“We’re not trying to please anyone when we do the films," says Delpy. “We’re just trying to be as true as possible, but what’s amazing is that people relate.”