So in a less snappy manner I'd call the fourth movie 'Before the Dying of the Light' – not quite as downbeat as Before Death, and because the dying of the light is a Dylan Thomas quote, and Jesse (I think) quotes Dylan Thomas in Before Sunrise...
The plot: the film opens in Rome, at preparations for a wedding – but we soon see this is not Jesse and Celine's wedding but that of one of their daughters, Ella. And of course Jesse and Celine are both there, but no longer together – they split up a few years after the events of Before Midnight. Now in their late sixties, they have had other relationships, have spent the intervening years comparing these new relationships to what they had before.
But Ella is having doubts about her marriage: her meeting with her boyfriend Ben was the complete opposite of how Jesse and Celine met. Ella met Ben on a dating site, the opposite of a romantic encounter, and Ella (like the young couple in Before Midnight) is doubtful about the sense in promising to stay with someone for the rest of your life. With modern relationships forged on the internet there is always the possibility of someone better. It is Ben who wants to be married, but Ella has serious wedding day jitters.
Celine and Jesse are both there counselling her – competitively counseling her you might say. While both really like Ben, Celine, the cynic, says of course she shouldn't marry if she has doubts; Jesse that perhaps she should give it a try. And of course they are both using the scenario to take sly digs for the other's role in the demise of their own relationship. But at the same time recognising the romance that they once had, and that they have lost.
And in order to resolve Ella's wedding problems, Celine and Jesse are forced to walk, together, through Rome – and through trying to help Ella, discuss what has happened to them in the intervening years. And what is currently happening is that Jesse's books about them have just been made into very successful films. And Celine is not happy about this, is angry at him for allowing the films to be made. She misses Jesse, part of her wants to be back with him. But another deeper part blames him, and his books, for the demise of their relationship – perhaps all this talking, she says, all this talking about ourselves, and this writing of books, and now making of films, all talking talking talking all the time, perhaps this is what made us fall apart? Maybe relationships need less talking and more secrets, secrets from each other?
And Jesse, whilst cowed, confesses that the only reason he made the films, as in a way the reason he wrote the books, was in order to be together with her. And perhaps to be together with her again, in their twilight years...
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