REVIEW: Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris, the most recent film by Woody Allen, is about a writer who looks back on a mythical golden age: Paris in the 20s.

I promise I won’t make a habit of reviewing movies here, but when a movie is as literary as Woody Allen’s most recent addition to his already impressive oeuvre, I think a review imposes itself. Furthermore, I’ve been interested in the legendary era the movie deals with explicitly — Paris in the 1920s — for years, and can’t hold myself from picking at what Woody Allen did with the abundance of material we have on that mythic decade. The problem with any movie or book that now turns its attention to Paris in the 20s is just that: the era has become so legendary that little can be added to it without falling into the trap of further mythologizing a golden age that is already largely fictitious. What has greatly contributed to the popularization of Paris in the 20s is books like Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast or John Glassco’s Memoirs of Montparnasse, which are cleverly disguised as memoirs, but are in fact reconstructions of long-past events written in the 1950s and 60s.

Woody Allen approaches the subject of Paris in the 1920′s with characteristic humor in Midnight in Paris, but also by cleverly shifting the movie’s attention away from the 20s themselves (although that time and place is visited multiple times) and into the broader concepts of the Golden Age and artistic anguish. In my opinion, however, Allen takes his point about romanticizing the past and not enjoying the present a little bit too far — or perhaps he just repeats it so much that it loses its value. Indeed, if you haven’t caught on to the fact that the main character is nostalgic for a lost time (the only thing we know about the novel he is writing is that it focuses on a nostalgia shop), or obsesses over a fantasy of Paris as it was in the imagined golden age of the 1920s, you don’t need to worry because the movie will bang you on the head with it until you get the point. 

Still, the film soars in the scenes that take place in the past, in which the protagonist, on the stroke of midnight, is able to climb aboard a vintage car and travel back in time in order to party with the Fitzgeralds, tell T. S. Eliot that people in the future measure their lives with coke spoons, get advice on women from Hemingway, discuss rhinoceroses with Dali, and ask Gertrude Stein for an opinion on his novel-in-progress. Unfortunately the characters sometimes fall into caricature (especially Hemingway, who I’m pretty certain did not talk like he wrote), but that’s okay because we’re given access to this fantasy world through the eyes of someone from our time. We are, in effect, not really visiting Paris in the 1920s, but rather the cultural construct we imagine Paris in the 20s to be. 

Le Dome, in Montparnasse, Paris, circa the 1920s, was one of the favorite haunts of the Lost Generation.

Where the film fails more obviously in its believability is in the modern-day Paris scenes, especially in the exchanges between Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams, in a mixture of dead scriptwriting and horrendous acting. There are also quite a bit of loose ends in the dialogue, and like so many writers who are left to their own devices by the sheer force of their fame and age, Allen simply needs an editor to clean up the guns he leaves lying around and never fires. Luckily a beautiful Marion Cotillard, at once bouncy and mysterious, saves the day as a muse from the 20s who is obsessed with her own Paris golden age, la Belle Époque. The Paris of the 20s is also beautifully shot in dark interiors, glittering party places, and faded sepias (compared to a hot and bright modern-day city). I also liked Allen’s attention to detail in depicting the Lost Generation, since he gives us glimpses of Belmonte — the Spanish toreador Hemingway raves so enthusiastically about in Death in the Afternoon — and the shy Alice B. Tolkas, Gertrude Stein’s housemate and lover. Midnight in Paris is therefore a pleasant summer divertissement, especially enjoyable for its gorgeous parisian scenery and fun literary references, but for me it remains a little bit shallow. 

It's a good thing Marion Cotillard and her smoldering eyes made a remarkable appearance in the movie.

Hipsters & Company

Shakespeare & Co — a perfect bookshop if there ever was one. Or is it?

Shakespeare and Company is certainly one of the most famous bookstores in the world. It was opened in 1919 by a young American Woman, Sylvia Beach, and eventually became a prominent place for the artistically minded American expats who were hanging out in Paris in the 1920s — people like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, coined “the lost generation” by Gertrude Stein. Beach also famously publishing James Joyce’s highly polemical Ulysses, now widely acknowledged to be one of the most influential novels of the 2oth century.

The original Shakespeare & Co closed in 1941, during the German occupation. The on which one can see and visit today, a stone’s throw from Notre-Dame, opened in 1951 under the name of Le Mistral. The owner, George Whitman, eventually changed the name to honour Beach’s store. Like the original Shakespeare & Co, the new one also became a kind of refuge for a community of edgy young American writers of the period — those who would become members of the Beat generation. Even today, the store — now managed by Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia (the name loops the loop rather perfectly) — apparently houses several budding writers who are there to read and write, provided they help out in the store for a couple of hours each day. There was an excellent article about the whole business in The Guardian a few years ago.

Disappointment was probably inevitable when I visited Shakespeare and Company myself at the beginning of the year. The place is too legendary and the literary references too great; how could a bookshop possibility live up to such a magical reputation? It does, in a way: the elegant, worn facade; the atmospheric maze of tiny rooms and cramped stairs; the clutter of typewriters and posters and people staring smartly at the shelves; and the books, of course — books, books everywhere, piles of them on the floor, on the tables, mountains of them climbing up to the ceiling and arching over the door frames, like a cluttered cave of paper. The problem is the people; Shakespeare and Co has become the ultimate hipster tourist destination in Paris. Forget spending a comfortable half hour in the reading room crammed with used books (for consultation only) upstairs; the incessant come and go of ogling, carefully outfitted twenty-somethings is much too irritating.

Inside the worn, book-filled interior of Shakespeare & Co

I wanted to be charmed by the bookshop and unfortunately I came out mainly disappointed, and then frustrated by my disappointment. The only comfort, I suppose, is that I was myself part of the ogling, whispering crowd. I was as much an annoying voyeur as they were, as much of a hipster looking for a culture fix, even if I think I deserved it more than they do! I even bought the Shakespeare & Co tote… Although I didn’t stay very long in the bookshop, from what I saw they had a good selection of new books and interesting staff picks. I also came out with a copy Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, which, being about bookshops, mentions Shakespeare and Co quite a lot. It was a fitting purchase.

In the end, the time spent browsing the green stands of the bouquinistes on the banks of the Seine nearby, where I found a yellowed NRF edition of Saint Exupéry’s Terre des Hommes, turned out to be an altogether more pleasing — and parisian — experience.

The famous bouquinistes, on the banks of the Seine.