Golden Age Thinking

Rating: 8/10 (5 November 2015)

The interesting thing about Midnight in Paris is that it sets you up into thinking this is another Alvy Singer - in Gil's first lines are those disparaging Hollywood hacks like himself and wishing to write something real, something substantive that can be counted amongst the literary canon. You know, the Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Steins. Then it sort of switches it around a little, and Gil becomes the hopeless romantic who is forever entranced by the rainy streets of Paris and Inez is the one who disparages him for this. And then finally Allen settles on a happy medium, where both possess different types of pretentiousness.
The city of love is established well, with the same loving treatment as the beginning of Allen's Manhattan. Before we are introduced to our couple, we are treated to a few minutes of a travelogue of sorts, postcard shots of the bridges, the streets, the park fountains, and of course the Eiffel Tower. Khondji bathes the entirety of these exterior shots in a warm golden glow, and we become aware of just how gorgeous it is. Later as Gil slips into the past, it becomes even more yellowy, the period sets becomes warm and homely, and the music fits - romantic saxophone, then the tender voice of Gale Porter. When Gil tries to hurry back to the party, he stumbles upon a sterile laundromat instead, lit harshly in blue green. The dream is over for tonight. When the group visit Monet's Water Lilies, Allen shoots them distantly, removed from its beauty in the sterile white oval room, and when we get a close-up, the painting is quickly obscured by the bickering of Inez and Gil, trying to get a word in. Some might call Allen's Paris too idealistic; you would be hard pressed to find a shot not in shallow focus, blurring the city lights, and the backdrop crisply clean. Well, the answer to that is, Gil sees what he wants to see.
From the first moment we are clear that this engaged couple is not meant to be. They exist on too entirely different world - Alvy Singer is not Gil, but in fact Paul, who is described as a pseudo-intellectual and pedantic. He is a professor of something, which allows him to be the expert on many things and drive a wedge between this engagement. Adams is fantastic; she certainly is sexy as designated by Gil, but there are little moments which make you wonder how she can be so sexy yet so infuriating. Gil is caught red-handed trying to pawn off her pearl earrings for some back-in-time sex, and here we have a scene in every romantic comedy, and it is so easy for Inez to get suspicious. But instead she vainly gestures at herself when seeing the present: "For moi?" Her parents are considerably more insufferable - right wing, high class and jealous parents stereotypes who dismiss chairs that are less than twenty grand, who set upon private detectives on soon-to-be son-in-laws, and from whom no doubt Inez learned her disdain for the help. That is one little line that speaks volumes of this relationship; another is the hilarious moment where Gil tries to justify it to Andriana, and mumbles out a compromise about "some types of Indian food".
The dreamy time travel sequences are not contemplative to their fullest extent. It's never easy to portray figures who have already been immortalised. Allen does it lightly and winks here and then; Hemingway drunkingly tries to spark a boxing match and talks pointedly of hunting and manhood, Zelda Fitzgerald is ditzy and given little time to really justify committing suicide, and that delightful scene where Gil offers up the idea of The Exterminating Angel, and Luis Buñuel is left bewildered at his own work of art. Gil explains his situation to a group of surrealists, and they seem fine with it. Another hilarious moment is when Kurt admits to having Gil tailed, and then we cut inexplicably to the poor man stuck and terrified in 18th century Versailles, and perhaps these events were real after all. The important thing is that Gil realises these legends aren't so much different than us all.
Of course, the detractors point at the twee and the remarkably idealistic romance of it all. Allen has Gil realise that nostalgia is denial, yet paradoxically places him within a very very beautiful modern Paris. In Gil's aspirational journey he uncovers another paradox; the endless cycle of nostalgia, and is shocked to discover that Andriana prefers the Belle Époque era to this wonderful period. So he departs for the inescapable present. Another director might have made Léa Seydoux's sweet character some sort of descendant of the Picasso mistress, because isn't that magical? But they make their own magic in the rainy streets of Paris. Up above, Van Gogh's starry night swirls. Everyone yearns for this sort of ending.