Midnight in Paris (2011)

After the panorama of failed dreams in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, here Woody Allen empowers his hero to escape his limited life through fantasy. 

Successful Hollywood hack Gil discovers an alternative life when his fiancee’s (shudder) Republican parents bring them to Paris. His imaginative experiences lead him to abandon his unsatisfying life, including his engagement, and to settle into his dream city, Paris. Presiding over his new romance is Cole Porter’s urbane “Let’s Do It.”

In the pre-title sequence a Dixieland song-long montage of the glorious sights of the city sets the stage. Over the credits Gil extolls the romance of Paris to his unsympathetic Inez, especially his desire to have lived there in The Golden Age, the 1920s. The hero of Gil’s novel runs a nostalgia store. That suggests his fascination with the past, which will mature into his decision to go live with it.

This film is an act of alchemy. Pedant Paul dismisses Gil’s romanticism as a pathology: “Nostalgia is denial - denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking, the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one one's living in. iI's a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.” 

But Allen makes Gil right and Paul wrong. About Rodin’s wife, as well as about the perception of an idealizing reality beyond the material. Hemingway’s lessons include the insight that Inez has been having an affair with Paul.

Gil’s 1920s romance, Adriana, rather than appreciating her contemporary glories, yearns for her lost Golden Age, the Belle Epoque. When both are transported there, Gauguin and his mates harken back to their Golden Age, the Renaissance. Even the Golden Agers yearn for a lost Golden Age. 

  Adriana decides to stay there. But Gil returns to his proper time, emboldened to deal with his reality. His lost heroes can still inform him as he navigates their world in his/our time.

Ironically, interior scenes in Gil’s current life are often shot in a golden glow themselves, in the characters’ hotel room as well as in the later visit to King Louis’s home at Versailles. That is, our time could well be the Golden Age for a future one. However harsh or drab our world, others may well find it their own preferable refuge — and so could we, as Gil ends. 

  What causes Paris’s alchemical miracle, bringing contemporary Paris to such life for Gil, is the arts. In his midnight meanderings Gil meets the artists and writers who have given him his romantic vision of the city. For Allen the artistic life, the freed imagination, provides an energy unavailable in uncompromising normalcy. As Gertrude Stein finds this theme in Gil’s novel — “The artist's job is not to succumb to despair but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence.” —  she evokes so many of Allen’s movies from Annie Hall on. 

Gil’s discovery of himself in Adriana’s memoir recalls Allen brilliant story of Madame Bovary stepping into a hapless professor’s life. Still, Gil misses out on the described consummation when she stays with Gauguin. 

Inez dismisses Gil’s love for Paris as “a fantasy.” But the past Gil perceives there is real. In the Parisienne Gabrielle, herself a nostalgia dealer at the flea market level, Gil finds his true soulmate, in name as in nature. She may not be Adriana but — she’s real and she’s there. Inez wasn’t.