It is surely no accident that Linklater chose to shoot the whole thing in Greece with a local crew. Greece, after all, is the perfect backdrop for the film's domestic squalls, the perfect metaphor for Celine and Jesse's relationship. Linklater's lovers are struggling to decide what has been ruined and what can be preserved. And Greece – at least Greece in its current state – gives us the idyll run aground. Teetering on the brink of default and "grexit", it offers its citizens a front-row seat for the break-up and breakdown; the one big premiere no one wants to attend.
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Delpy would go along with that – but only up to a point. "You might say this film is smashing the first film, ruining the dream. But isn't it somehow more optimistic to show what comes next? Before Midnight is about the hardship of being together. So you either find that depressing, because you want to keep the idealistic fantasy of a love that is unsustainable. Or you grit your teeth and move forward. For me, that's not destroying the first film. That's building on it. And yes, it's a bit like this country. It's built on ruins and it's in a lot of trouble. But it's still ongoing, it's still surviving. You just have to keep on building."
After all the fuss and panic, the Athens screening goes off without a hitch. At the end, once the credits have rolled, the guests emerge to find the landscape magically transformed. During the intervening two hours, the protesters have gone, the riot police have vanished. Outside the cinema, the bunting has been removed, the cordons stacked away. The street that a few hours before played host to the premiere is now just an everyday street again, with stragglers on the kerb and some vagrants in the doorway. The movie has finished and the circus has moved on.
Will we meet Celine and Jesse again, another nine years down the road? The film-makers don't know, or aren't saying, and on balance I think that's probably for the best. The Before Sunrise movies remind us that life is precious. They tell us there are no givens and no guarantees, and no way of knowing when the last meeting will be. Everyone – protesters and reporters, movie actors and star-crossed lovers – is merely passing through, temporary cast-members in a play called Fleeting. Still there, still there, and then suddenly gone.
• Before Midnight opens in the UK on 21 June.