The Golden Age of the Lost People
There’s a golden age all of us look back to with a romantic eye, wishing we had been alive in that time and corner of the world. Whether it be an alienation from the staleness of the present, feeling out of synch with time, or just a fascination with the aesthetic and attitudes of that era, all of us wish to get out of here, even if it is for a little while. As fond as we are of nostalgia, it can be a thick bitter syrup that makes the present taste worse compared to an unrealistic and inaccurately subjective taste of the past. This sentimentality can very quickly turn into senility. The question I pose is, can you be nostalgic for a period you never lived through? Of course, reading about these eras and constantly surrounded by a mix of collective memories and music coming out of those years makes us feel like we were alive and there, but were we really? Are we just experiencing the times through the sounds and brush strokes of its art?
I should probably stop dissecting nostalgia before I come across a dark tumour among its undertones.
Gil Pender, our focal character in Midnight in Paris (2011) is under the heady intoxication of such nostalgia. He’s the perfect victim, engaged to an extremely annoying woman who is pulling him further away from his desires, out of touch with his time and place in the world, he takes a vacation to his favourite city, Paris. Every midnight, a 1920’s Peugeot would pick him up and whisk him away to his ‘golden age’ of Paris, the 20’s, where he meets his idols of the Lost Generation, such as Hemmingway, Fitzgerald and Stein, among the many artists and writers he meets. It wasn’t long until he fell in love with an attractive woman from the past who also shares his sense of nostalgia, but for an even earlier French era, La Belle Époque. Themes of romanticising an earlier time than your own are everywhere within the film, from the way characters speak to the way some of them act so sullenly and lost within their present. What is also balefully clear is the authenticity of modernity, in the presence of modernist writers and artists, coupled with the sensibilities of the 20’s, there isn’t a single sign of postmodernism in sight. This I find strange and uncanny, we’re up to the eyeballs in postmodern artefacts that have been hacked and sewn together from things of the past, so to watch a world – or an immaculate rendition of it – where such chaos doesn’t exist is a bit weird, the sort of easy-going weirdness that I can’t resist.
Regardless of time, this film is about space, that space is Paris. The romantic and sumptuous city is framed though a series of beautiful establishing shots of the streets and boulevards, people going about their lives, busy being the classiest people on Earth. The opening kind of reminds me of the way Woody Allen opens Manhattan (1979), which doesn’t surprise me because both films gaze upon the idyllic nature of the city. A city like Paris has the cinematography to match, immaculate and rich. The camera doesn’t go off into obvious and dizzying movements because it’s not suitable here, this is Paris, so the camera has little movement, making me take the entire breadth of the city, and on occasions the camera did move, it did so gracefully.
Meanwhile in the 20’s, everyone is dressed in sumptuous, sparkling clothes, smoking cigarettes indoors and dancing in classy, dim lit, carpeted bars with a martini in hand. The art direction of the film flung me back through time into their midst, the expression of pure confused joy of my face rivalling that on Gil’s. Keep in mind that we see Gil’s version of Paris, through his eyes and by his side, which the brilliant set and costume design, as well as the sensitivities of all the artists and writers he meets, reflects.
Owen Wilson plays this awkward yet uncontrollably enthusiastic character with ease, almost feeling like he’s playing himself, whatever you think of that prospect is totally up to you. Rachael McAdams perfectly pulls off the ingratiatingly annoying wife whose eyes will go for somebody else at the first sign of indifference. The star of the show for me though was Adrian Brody doing Salvador Dali. His wild-eyed raving wonderful enthusiasm and energy beams from his face and actions. All the performances are great and a pleasure to behold.
Is the present something that dulls itself overtime? If we had spent enough time during our preferred golden age, pretty soon it would become our present and the need to flee elsewhere will come quickly. If only a period-appropriate transport will come and pick me up at midnight to take me back to San Francisco during the late 60’s, soon enough I’d probably want to get out of there as well.
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