Midnight in Paris and nostalgia

Marion Cotillard (left) and Owen Wilson in a typical shot from Midnight in Paris. Image found here.

Midnight in Paris (2011; dir. Woody Allen).

Thanks to my colleague (and film buff) Larry the Movie Guy, the Mrs. and I watched Midnight in Paris this past Friday night. The Mrs.' quickie review: "That wasn't as terrible as I had expected." (She had said earlier that she has had trouble understanding Woody Allen films in the past and was afraid this might be the case again with this one.) As for me, I confess to not being too excited about seeing this one; I'd read a positive review last summer that, even so, made its time-warp sequences sound to me, in that precise film-critique term, "flaky." But because I still have yet to see many Woody Allen films and because the first R-rated film I ever saw was Manhattan (I was mesmerized; I'd never seen a film like that before), and because Midnight in Paris was nominated for Best Picture last year, I thought I'd give this one a go.

I liked it, too, though it's not a film I absolutely must own a copy of. But something about it nagged at me and, as I sit here thinking about what nagged at me, I think also that that feeling just may be intentional on the film's part.

T.S. Eliot called London "Unreal city" in "The Waste Land;" that's probably the best way to think of Allen's Paris in the "now" of this film. The film's 4-minute-long opening sequence of shots of Paris progressing from morning to late afternoon, some scenes more familiar than others, all of them looking like images for travel posters, their colors looking a whole like any number of Impressionist paintings you've seen, sets the mood for the rest of the film. This is pretty ironic when you think about it: the Impressionists sought to paint exactly what they saw in the instant that they saw it, unedited. But of course paintings, no matter how spontaneous their creation, are themselves a mediated medium, just as all art is. For those of us whose sole experience of this city comes via photographs and paintings, these images become "Paris" for us; Paris the actual city, where millions of people live and work, not all of them especially happily, recedes from us. Towards the end of the opening sequence, we hear Owen Wilson's Gil Bender in voice-over, waxing rhapsodic about turn-of-the-(20th-)century Paris, and Gil's fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) tells him that he's not in love with a city but with a fantasy, and we'll eventually come to realize that what we've been seeing is Gil's image of what he imagines must have been the ideal time to have been in Paris, not the actual place. (Unless I'm forgetting something, the most contemporary structure we see in the opening sequence is the glass pyramid in front of the Louvre.) We've just been shown a Paris, in other words, that is the result of Gil's fashioning from things he has read and seen of it from a time that he admires.

This post was going to be a bit of a rant about how we have here yet again a film in which Americans glide across the surface of a place, never seeing it on its own terms, for good or for ill; that this film asks us to prefer Gil's culture tourist to Inez's and her parents' (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) chilly, cash nexus-driven engagements with the place, yet Gil's back-in-time midnight perambulations aren't any more genuine. Nor is the desire of the flapper Adrianna (Marion Cotillard) to stay in the warp that deposits her and Gil in the Belle Epoque of late 19th-century Paris. That is, her desire is genuine, but that which she seeks to achieve through its pursuit is not.

As I first thought about this film, I thought it was diving into some pretty, and pretty deep, nostalgia-wallowing. In thinking about it more, though, I see that it pulls out of that dive. These desires for times other than Now, as Gil rather wordily tells Adrianna towards the end of the film, are pursuits of happiness rather than of genuineness--just as Inez in her own way had told him near the beginning of the film. Inez isn't well-suited for Gil, but she knows him better than he knows himself.

I think to say much more would be to spoil some things, so I will stop here. But I will say that Midnight in Paris is a sly meditation on the seductiveness--and, thus, the perils--of nostalgia. Worth seeing, or borrowing from someone.