Before Midnight catches the lovers at the end of a summer holiday in the Peloponnese. They are together and have children. But old wounds still smart and their circumstances are a drag. The mood is plaintive, melancholy, verging on fatalistic. Where Jesse and Celine once seemed to welcome change, they have now grown to fear it. Where they once regarded themselves as the centre of the world, they now realise they are merely bit-players, utterly dispensable and already halfway towards the exit door. At one stage an elderly woman informs them they are merely passing through. At another Jesse laments the failure of an ambitious novel with a cumbersome title: Temporary Cast-Members of a Long-Running But Little-Seen Production of a Play Called Fleeting. Down by the seafront, Celine watches the sun sink below the line of an island. "Still there," she says. "Still there ... Still there ... Gone.