Pipe Dreams of the Past

I've never written about a film on my blog before, but today I saw one that was so in-tune to my inner being that I wanted to share it. Like many of Woody Allen’s films, Midnight in Paris relies on an imaginative universe, a main character's phobias becomes it's charm. It may not be one of his best films, but it's easy, graceful, shares a similar soundtrack of flamenco guitar to Vicky Cristina Barcelona and is a pleasure to watch.

The hero, Gil, is played by Owen Wilson, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who considers himself a hack and wants to write novels, preferably in Paris, where he’s on holiday with his fiancée, Inez played by Rachel McAdams. And if he had his druthers, he’d be doing it in Paris in the twenties, alongside Scott and Zelda, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Picasso, Dali, Cocteau, and all those giants creating enduring works of art.

Gil considers Paris in the twenties as its golden age and finds disappointment at living in the here and now (something I identified with) while Inez scoffs.

The mechanism by which Gil travels back in time to his beloved era is through a vintage automobile at midnight and this goes happily unexplained. Allen breezes past all that, the way he did in his great The Purple Rose of Cairo– another one of my favorites.

The Hemingway character looms so large and his lines are so good, I wish I would have had a pen in hand. And Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali was such brilliant casting and a greater treasure than a thousand clowns– his rhinoceros line was pure Allen schtick.

Marion Cotillard plays a mistress to the star-artists of the twenties, and she fits in so well to the era that she creates her own cinematic presence. But her character Adriana also fantasizes about another time period and for her Paris was in its' heyday during la belle epoque.

Like many of Allen's films it's beautiful to look at; a visual feast with characters looming larger than life and ends with a moral, this time vaguely self-deprecating, with an anti-nostalgia kick: Everyone wishes that he or she lived in another era, even people in that other era.

What would you say to that?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-5RFMiFQpc&feature=fvst