This question floated through my mind many times when watching "Midnight Paris". There is a character in the movie, Paul, who is a standard "knowledge" who knows a little about everything. In the Rodin Sculpture Garden, he could argue with the tour guide about the creation details of a work, and he could discuss the prototype of the person in the painting in front of Picasso's paintings. Therefore, the heroine looked at him in admiration, ignoring the angry eyes of his fiance beside him. Basically, you can see that there is a mild irony here. Any well-educated middle-class audience (which is the main target of the film) will smile at this kind of irony.
But on the other hand, as an audience, you will soon discover that this movie actually expects its audience to be someone like Paul, otherwise it will be difficult to capture the subtle meaning of the plot behind it. If you can't immediately understand when you hear the name Zelda, you will lose a laugh. If you can't immediately reflect who Pablo is, you have missed another baggage. If you don't understand French, although it doesn't affect the end of the movie, you can only sit awkwardly in the French dialogue and feel as if you have been discriminated against. This kind of molestation of the audience's literary and artistic knowledge quickly reached an irritating level, just like the feeling when meeting a person who is full of Habermas or Derrida at a party. When the protagonist used an exaggerated American accent to marvel at "Oh, Eliot, God, are you really TS Eliot" for countless times, I finally completely lost my patience. Does the director know that there is something called a sense of proportion? Shaking the same bag too many times is unappetizing.
Unfortunately, this movie has been struggling with this problem from beginning to end. The protagonist Gil loves these names, and loves the feeling of pushing a cup with Hemingway or Dali, and the girl he likes, Adriana, is the same, except that the object is changed to Gauguin and Degas. Gil and Paul seem to be hostile to each other, but in fact they are just two sides of the same coin. Their mockery of each other can be regarded as the self mockery of Woody Allen (or any similar literary middle-aged). You can live like a fish in this world, or you can be fascinated by the golden age of the imaginary old days, and you can even be in a dilemma, but the people you want to remember here will always be these roaming figures.
However, a "well-educated middle-class audience" (is there a shorter word that can express the same meaning?) really can only look at Paris in this light?
If I were to cite my favorite five minutes in this movie, I would choose the first scenery slide without hesitation. Not only because of its beauty, but because there is no Gertrude Stein, no Man Ray, no Luis Buñuel, only housewives who buy baguettes, lovers whispering side by side by the Seine, children playing by the iron tower, and loneliness under the street lights. Stone road. Paris is of course a mobile feast, but it is more than that.
When Gil and Adriana were walking on the quiet streets of Paris at midnight, I used to think they could walk a little longer, walk slower, talk about topics that don't contain names, or say nothing, just walk slowly side by side for a while. Is there a better place for a walk than the deep alleys of Paris at midnight?
But before all this happened, there was another carriage passing by, carrying them to the next celebrity gathering place.
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