The golden age might be right now

Rating: Null/10 (24 October 2011)

Film is a strange medium. No matter how hard it tries to pretend to be part of our present or conform with our sense of time – at the end of the day, film is always a thing of the past. Whatever we see on the screen has already happened and is gone. The filmic presence is a pretended one, it is the presence of what is no longer there. A similar thing happens with time: Time on film is a very fluid thing. It can slow down and speed up, jump back and forth, be linear or run in circles. And sometimes it even defies all our attempts at grasping it, becoming an ever-changing floating entity that is never what it seems. Yet the physical presence of the moving images gives that elusive thing, time, a presence no other art can claim. Time is a toy for film to play with. In this sense (and in many others), Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris is a film about time in film, or rather about time, exploring it in a way only film can.
Gil Pender is a man of the past. Not that he has the best behind him but for everything he does his inspiration lies in the past. He dreams of a golden age which for him were the 1920, especially the Paris of the 1920. The contrast between this dreamer and the world of the here and now is clear right from the start. The lost glance, the wide eyes, the constant sense of him not really being there – Owen Wilson does not need much, a glance here, a delayed movement there, to convey the sense of someone fallen out of time. He the hectic yet meandering totally Allenesque style of speaking, those words constantly chasing themselves, with an almost trancelike perception, an elliptic interaction with the world. This "real world"is chiefly represented by his fiancé played almost painfully ordinarily by Rachel McAdams. The mundane, the pseudo- intellectual, the snobistic and utilitarian is overdone a little, yet she still serves as a good foil to Wilson's denial of what is widely regarded as real.
Yet it is the real and unreal, the present and the past which come to unravel, swap places and becoming all part of a larger reality which is that of film. Suddenly Gil who dreams of his personal golden age, finds himself in the middle of it. When he gets lost in Paris and midnight strikes he gets a lift from a party in an old 1920s cars and suddenly he is right in that period. He meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, Man Ray, Picasso, Cole Porter, has his novel read by Gertrud Stein, his relationship analysed by Hemingway and suggests film ideas to Bunuel. And, of course he falls in love. With Picasso's lover who used to be with Modigliani and Braque and , finding out that Gil is engaged, runs off with Hemingway to Africa. Marion Cotillard plays her with fragile purity for she is a dreamer, too. Her golden age is the Paris of the belle époque and when they end up there, she decides to stay.
Gil, however, returns and Allen allows him (and us) a hint he might have found a soul mate right in the present. For despite all the nostalgia, it's here we must live, as Woody Allen well knows. But nonetheless, the past, the real as well as the imagined, can be as much a part of our present as dreams can roll into our reality. Maybe, our lives can be a little fuller if we allow them to be a little more than film and accept that time can be more than one thing, past and present, linear and circular, constant and ever-changing. A fairy tale that only Allen can get away with and a film about the power of the imagination and the possibility that our golden age might be just now. If only we could see it.