Midnight and Paris: nostalgia, romance, architecture and modernity

Rating: 9/10 (19 March 2017)

Paris is a character of its own history. The city's mark is on the overlay of architectural styles and monuments from different eras. The Parisian blocks are a sort of timeline that allows us to understand it culturally and get even more interested on Woody Allen's perception of Paris as a nostalgic city. The initial sepia scenes with instrumental music and a background jazz song are the first reference the director makes to the past. The following scenes are mostly based on Owen Wilson's romantic American writer character view and perception.
During the movie, characters assure it would be better to live in a different age; the Golden Age. This nostalgia that structures the whole movie is defined by the dictionary as a "a feeling of pleasure and also slight sadness when you think about things that happened in the past". The narrow streets, low- rise buildings, big squares and wide boulevards, orange chimneys over the bluish gray roofs compose a scenario that can teleport the viewer - literally. It's definitely not a coincidence that Allen chose to film a movie with this theme in Paris.
Nostalgia is mostly associated with a wish to recover the time before modernism and it is a relation between an unsatisfactory present and the past as an escape valve. According to Baudelaire, it is to thrive for an ideal present and its lost potential; Instead of searching for the perfect past era. Therefore, Paris is more than just the scenario of the movie. It is the character that makes all the time-traveling possible.
On Gil's first trip to the modernist Paris – that happens without any explanation or logic – he meets great figures as the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and Cole Porter. The surrealism of living on two different eras is stressed ironically when Owen Wilson's character meets Man Ray, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí at a bar: "You inhabit two worlds. So far I see nothing strange."
Allen's screenplay and the well-played parts by Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams transcend the present and even the movie screen to intrigue viewers to think about Paris itself. At the same time the nostalgia and time-traveling idealize a romantic past age of the city, it makes us think about its present and future. As french architect Portzamparc once said, should we promote a further development of Paris or, mostly, preserve it?