by Brian Kesler
Woody Allen's 'Midnight in Paris,' is impossible to resist. It's the feel good movie of the past year, filled with such nostalgia and incomparably witty dialogue, easy-going jazz music, beautiful shots of Paris (particularly by night), and a romantic sensibility that will win over all of its viewers, cynical or not, ignorant and so on.
It is also impossible for me to talk about the film without spoiling the plot, so if you wish to experience the film on its own accord and subject yourself to a wonderful surprise, do not read this review. The film opens with Gil (Owen Wilson), a writer, asking his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) to imagine Paris in the '20s at night in the rain. She doesn't see the romance, and if you're anything like her you might be untouched by the movie. The couple are in Paris on vacation with Inez's parents, who are the cliche of upper-class American snobbery. They think Gil should stick to writing movie scripts, while Gil - taken in by the romance of Paris - hopes to write the next great American novel, in the style of the modernist writers of the '20s: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. He is sick of spending time with his material-minded fiancee, who only ever wants to shop, and her pretentious (or pedantic, as one character puts it) friends who lift their noses at fifty dollar wines and think that if they try hard enough to sound French when using words such as 'Versailles,' they'll come across as more cultured. One friend, in particular (played by Michael Sheen) takes over the narrative of a tour guide and looks down on her when she disputes his facts of Parisian art. Gil needs an escape, and he gets it. Lost in the streets of Paris at midnight, Gil is invited into a car and is transported into the 1920s.
This is where the film takes off and becomes the story of life and art in 1920s Paris. We meet, among many others, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, Alice Toklas, Man Ray, T.S. Elliot, Henri Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Degas, and so on. If you are unfamiliar with everybody on this list, the film might have less of an impact for you. For those who know these legendary artists, the film takes great fun in exploring all the cliches of their characters and their works and their attitude towards their time in life. For example, their is a hilarious sequence when Gil suggests to Bunuel a story for a movie: A group of guests sit down for dinner and afterward can't get out of the room. Bunuel asks, "But why?" and Gil says, "They just can't," to which Bunuel replies, "I don't get it." If you don't understand what makes that scene funny, you may have less an appreciation for the film, but even without the proper knowledge for certain in-jokes, the movie is a fuel tank for education into American and Parisian contemporary art and literature and does so in an enchanting way that will have anyone smiling by the end.
My favorite development of the story is the attitude artists take toward their art and their contemporaries. The artists of the '20s long to be in the "Gay '90s" or the 1890s, their idea of the high point in life and art. The artists of the 1890s, however, find the art of the time dull and not innovative. And so on and so on, suggesting that we must do our best in the decades we've been chosen to represent and find the beauty and good that surrounds us now, rather than look back longingly on the past. Gil has another reason for not staying in the '20s: "These people don't have any antibiotics."
'Midnight in Paris' is Woody Allen's best film in many years. Probably since 'Annie Hall,' or 'Hannah and her Sisters.' It is the kind of film that pulls the viewer into an out-of-body experience, where we follow these characters into the '20s and wish, like them, we could stay there forever. Unfortunately, we can't, and we - like Gil - need to stop living in the past and start living in the present. If we don't, we'll make no mark and might as well never have lived at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment