By Natasha Naayem
Even the distant past is a lens at arm’s length that can offer us a cold, hard look at the present. Often, for reasons that threaten our immediate desires or embedded delusions, we refrain from bringing it to our attention; we conveniently don’t go there. In Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen explores the past in order to allow his protagonist, Gil (Owen Wilson), to see his relationship with Inez (Rachel McAdams) in a new light. But Woody Allen’s treatment of the past and present also serves a different purpose. Through the evolution of these two main characters––Inez, whose scenes take place only in the present, and Gil, who appears in scenes in the past––Woody Allen illuminates a greater truth about the city his film features, which doesn’t illuminate in the same way for everyone.
Midnight in Paris is a delightful comedy with a premise that centers on Gil’s time-travels back to Paris in the 1920s. Gil is a romantic. He dreams of strolling the Left Bank in the rain with a baguette under his arm. He wants to trade in his Malibu beach house for an attic with a skylight, his high-paying job as a screenwriter for full-time novel writing. His fiancé Inez and nemesis Paul (Michael Sheen), accuse him of being nostalgic, diagnosing him with “Golden Age thinking,” the definition of which the pedantic know-it-all Paul reveals to us as they wander around the gardens of Versailles, on page ten of the screenplay.
~
PAUL
Nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present.
INEZ
He’s a romantic. Gil would be just fine living in a perpetual state of denial.
PAUL
The name for this fallacy is called Golden Age thinking.
INEZ
Touché.
PAUL
The erroneous notion that a different time period was better than the one, one’s living in. It’s a flaw in the romantic imagination of those who find coping with the present too difficult.
~
Gil’s present (and future) is embodied in Inez, to whom he is engaged-to-be-married. The shot that follows the final line of dialogue is a close-up of a diamond wedding band, in the company of ruby earrings and a diamond pendant. A wider shot reveals Inez and her mother, Helen (Mimi Kennedy), in front of Chopard, the Swiss jeweler. They are deciding on a ring, discussing the bandwidth of its sparkle, certain in their choice of jewelry but less so on the man who is supposed to offer it to her.
~
INEZ
I love a diamond wedding band. The way it sparkles, they’ll see it in the last row when he puts it on my finger.
HELEN
This is going to be such an event. I only wish –
INEZ
(cutting her off)
I don’t want to keep going over it, Mom.
HELEN
Look, he’s your choice. What can I say?
INEZ
Gil’s smart and successful.
HELEN
And yet he talks about giving it all up and moving here. That frightens me.
INEZ
The world is full of people who dream of writing the great American novel. Let me handle him.
HELEN
Your father thinks you’re comfortable with Gil because you can control him.
INEZ
He likes to please me – is that so terrible? Oh gosh – I have to go – Paul arranged a private tour of the Rodin Museum.
~
The couple’s differences in priorities are evident, but only by going back in time (by physically going there) and playing out his fantasies––partying and philosophising with the Lost Generation––does Gil manage to face his truth: that he isn’t in love with Inez, and that it isn’t the past that he’s after, simply a different life in the present. “I was attracted to another woman,” Gil admits to Inez during their final scene together, when he announces that he’s leaving her and staying in Paris, “but it was the whole deal – meeting Gertrude Stein and Hemingway and Dalì and Scott and Zelda –” (artists actively engaged in their present) that allows Gil to reimagine and change his present.
Woody Allen’s treatment of nostalgia isn’t subtle. Paul obnoxiously gives us his assessment of the situation early on in the narrative and later on Gil realises Paul was right. After all, Gil reflects, living in the past would mean making do without dishwashers, novocaine, and movies on demand. But by secluding Inez to the present and allowing Gil into the past, Woody Allen sheds light on a more subtle truth, one about Paris as a city, one that defies time and is instead very much anchored in space: that while Paris is always a terrific place to be a guest, it can also be a terrible place to be a tourist.
The City of Lights has been known to short circuit its most fragile Japanese visitors, who experience “Paris syndrome,” a psychological condition from acute culture shock often brought on when their highly-romanticized ideals of Paris are met with impatient waiters and drunkards urinating on subway walls. The Japanese embassy had to put a hotline in place. This is an extreme example of Paris’ alienating powers, but even those amongst the most glamorous set from cosmopolitan cities, come to Paris for Fashion Week, have written about how lonely the city can feel, how far they are from the heart of things, all those cours d’intérieurs full of vibrant life behind the stoic beauty of Parisian facades.
“In its countless alveoli,” French philosopher Gaston Bachelard says, “space contains compressed time.” Or, as Gil says at one point, “Paris is Paris.” The beauty of Paris is that it transcends time: its wonderfully homogenous Haussmannien structures have survived threats of large-scale destruction (see The Diplomat) and largely warded off the infestation of modern monstrosities such as the Tour Montparnasse. Still, Woody Allen knows that Paris’ most coveted prize is access. The “true” Paris doesn’t lie in another era but behind elusive and closed doors, which, when they open, can feel just as magical as time-travel. The doors open for Gil, who gets invited to locals’ apartments and parties, one of which is thrown in the midst of a fête foraine, mesmerizing carousels galore. He discusses paintings unframed and propped freely against a wall, prose unbound and malleable, truths at once far-fetched and feasible:
~
GIL
It sounds so crazy when I say it and you’ll think I’m drunk but I’ve got to tell someone I’m from a different time – a whole other era – the future – and I pass from the two thousandth millennium to here – a car picks me up – I slide through time –
MAN RAY
Exactly correct – you inhabit two worlds – so far I see nothing strange.
~
In the present, dragging Gil along, Inez samples Paris with white gloves. Paul is her guide, and with their respective significant others they stand around tables covered in white cloth tasting wine, listen to Paul regurgitate facts on paintings secured in echoing museums, snap photos of Versailles.
When talking about Picasso’s portrait of Adriana (Marion Cotillard), his muse and Gil’s love interest, Gertrude Stein says that Picasso’s intimate knowledge of Adriana has reduced her portrait to a “creature of Place Pigalle. A whore with volcanic appetites.” Woody Allen’s portrait of Inez-as-the-tourist similarly reduces her to her basic vulgar pleasures. When she isn’t touring with the gang, Inez’s scenes are most often restricted to the bedroom or to boutiques. Paris brings out the worst in Inez, and, “caught up in the whole mystique of this corny city,” she ends up cheating on Gil with Paul, an act Woody Allen spares Gil from committing, keeping Gil’s dignity intact. In Paris, Gil searches for love, not lust; substance between the sheets of his manuscript, not forty-thousand dollars worth of furniture on the hardwood floor of an aspirational Malibu beach house.
Paris’ layers of access are as numerous as its arrondissements, and, unlike Dante’s circles of Hell, it is the people in its outer layers that suffer the most. The Paris we love and revere was built off of a wholesale urbanization program, put in place by Louis Bonaparte, who proclaimed himself emperor after holding a coup in 1851. He hired Georges-Eugène Haussmann to put the demolition (and rebuilding) in place. Thus, the “City of Light” as we know it was born, but not without dispossessing the working class in impoverished quarters. And so goes the cycle of keeping certain people “out” and certain people “in”: extra-muros “Parisians” alienated from intra-muros Parisians, the French from the Parisians, the come-to-work from the born-and-raised, the tourists from the guests, the divisions kept stark against a background built in celebration of homogeny, which, in order to be achieved, necessitates the eradication of differences––a threat very much present and under debate in France’s contemporary capital.
But of course Midnight in Paris is not an overtly political film. It is overwhelmingly “light,” “utterly charming,” “wonderful,” “enjoyable,” “hysterically funny,” “graceful,” and an “absolute delight,” to quote several critics. I would also add that it is generous. We can scoff at Inez and her pompous parents who watch a “wonderfully funny American film” while in Paris (which is exactly what you––and I––were doing if you were watching this film in a Parisian theater), but we can also scoff at Gil and his corny lines (Is there anything more cliché than describing Paris by quoting the title of Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast?). As visitors of the world conceived by Woody Allen, we are allowed to find allegiances in both portraits. Woody Allen invites all his spectators to be flâneurs, opening his film with a two-minute montage, spooled from a line of script that takes only a few seconds to read: pov shots of paris set to music. Before dialogue, before action, before title sequence, Paris silently unfolds before us: we see vast boulevards lined with handsomely trimmed trees, opulent bridges spanning the Seine, charismatic cobblestone alleyways, iconic Parisian monuments––the Moulin Rouge, l’Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, amongst others––all set to Woody Allen’s characteristic choice of jazz music. With this unusually lengthy suspension of “plot,” Allen encourages us to be inspired by and to project our thoughts onto the Parisian scenery, our experiences distinguished only by where we go in the privacy of our minds.