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Midnight In Paris.

Couëron A friend over lunch had just been enthusing to me about the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris, and lo and behold, Catherine, unbidden, brought it home from the library the next day.  The coincidence made watching it irresistible; and anyway, I was curious about it.  Several people I know had loved it, while others found it a representative sample of the intellectual vapidization that occurs when Hollywood and Global Tourism combine forces.

how to buy stromectol It is certainly the case that the movie is not heavy-hitting intellectual brilliance.  Allen himself has said of it that he wrote the script quickly and easily, without any attempt at creating depth of character: he just wanted Hemingway to brush across the screen and say something manly, and he wanted Dali to be surreal, and that was about it.  Fitzgerald looks elegant and offers you a drink.  Some lines are lifted from A Moveable Feast and other relevant sources even though it is difficult to speak things that writers write in memoirs, and they don’t entirely come off onscreen.

But if you allow yourself to surrender to the movie, it really is quite charming.  Allen has said that he started with nothing but the title, and crafted the movie around it: and the title suggests something romantic, and full of warmth and life and a little bit of mystery and the uncertainty of what can happen in the middle of the night in a great and beautiful city.  And it works: the movie is eminently suggestive of those riches of the imagination which great and haunted cities offer, and the combination of good looks, artistic personalities, and pretty cityscapes onscreen makes for good cinema.

The basic conceit of the movie is that the lead character (a writer played by Owen Wilson) finds himself transported, by the magic of one particular corner in Paris, back to the 1920s, where he finds himself surrounded and embraced by the famous artists of that era.  He makes several trips back and forth, which makes his actual life – submerged in the conformist stupidity of American upper-class society – seem unwise and unfulfilled.  There are several little imaginative twists which show Allen’s ability to execute deft cinematic turns, and the script is generally amusing.

Catherine was a bit uncertain about the movie, finding that it was neither truly funny the way Annie Hall is, nor moving the way more serious movies can be.  In this respect it reminded me of Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery: a combination of murder mystery with marital-ennui flick which manages to make no particular contribution to either genre and remains charming nonetheless.  A light heart is required to enjoy these films.

As for those who found Midnight In Paris culpably vapid, I cannot much agree with them.  It never pretends to be a biopic of any of the artists depicted; and in fact its topic is more accurately intellectual nostalgia, and its engagement with this topic is in the end quite responsible.  The Owen Wilson character goes back to the 20s to find the people there similarly believing they had all been born too late to catch the world at the peak of its bloom and beauty, and he is forced to reflect on the problem and, ultimately, return back to his own time.  And the root of all escapism Allen truly identifies as avoidance of the real problems of one’s own life: Wilson has to do something about his failing, materialistic marriage (which he does).

I think there is also some sense that Owen Wilson, as an actor, lacks the intellectual weight necessary to share a café table in Paris with Hemingway and Fitzgerald.  He is never able to put much heft in the character, and for those who feel that you need credentials to sit at that table, seeing him there does seem a bit silly.  But Wilson brings an Everyman quality to the movie, and with that an innocent joy in being immersed in such famous company, which is charming and democratic.  He may be a bit like Forrest Gump dropped into the Lost Generation, but the Lost Generation probably could have used more innocence and joy anyway.  In cinematic terms Wilson manages to make his Paris feel like something he hasn’t earned – rather it is just something he is willing to try, while many others, so wrapped up in themselves, shut their eyes to it and miss it.  You can feel something similar in all these great cities, in Paris, in Rome, in Venice, in London – the sense that any given night could bring you face to face with a throng of ghosts, and that your own awareness of their presence gives them a kind of beautiful immortality: not enough to assuage our fear of death, not enough to overcome the sorrows of life, but something, and beautiful.

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