Midnight in Paris

I could not skip Woody Allen’s new film and watched it with great pleasure. It seems that Woody has become milder and more romantic with the age. His sarcasm and irony have become smoother and this film was almost poetic, although still Allen-ish.

Here are moments from the film, which seemed striking to me.

The hero is absorbed with extreme admiration for Paris, but unfortunately he shares it with the wrong people. It seems that he is so very out of place and so misunderstood…

As a counter fact his fiancée adores her friends (married couple) almost as much as he adores Paris.

His fiancé, her parents and her friends are so…hmmm how to put it in exact words. Well they are people who prefer Californian wine, as opposed to French wine. It says it all, I guess.

The hero is drunk and alone, walking in Paris empty streets. What can be better? Only a trip to the past J

Shaking hands with Scot Fitzgerald, talking to Hemingway and Picasso, drinking with Dali… amazing how happy everyone ”back there is”. It’s all about drink, laugh and music. It is peaceful place with no worries. That just illustrates hero’s nostalgic idealization of the past.

Did the scenes from the present get on your nerves too? It seems that Woody managed to show the contrast between guy’s feelings in the past and in the present and how unpleasant the present is to him. Guy’s fiancée and others are distracting and annoying the viewer. We want to just get rid of them.

The scene when they go from the past to the past. I guess it shows that when real feelings, such as love, excitement, pleasure, passion, anticipation and others are there the time does not matter.

The sad fact that most of great men would like to go back to the past because they think that in the past people were better… Does it mean that regression, degradation and devaluation are permanent processes?

And the last question, which was turning in my head, was why? Why didn’t he stay in the past, where he fitted better? There was nothing in the present which could possibly keep him – nothing worth coming back to. Don’t tell me he was serious when he was telling about the antibiotics, which did not exist in the past