Woody Allen can be regarded as a model of "film author", and it is clear right from the beginning of the movie. The empty shots for a few minutes are only the city view of Paris, just like the opening scene of "Manhattan" thirty years ago, the symphony and the city images impact our senses. Maybe it’s a good start for the story, maybe it’s nothing to do with the story. It’s just the director’s tribute to the great city. Borrowing his own words in the movie this time, in front of the city, any genius painter and immortal writer is eclipsed. The city is the greatest art.
In Allen's movies, you see only one type of people: the middle class. You will never see men wearing t-shirts and shorts, or women wearing colorful fashion clothes. The men and women in his films always wear "fit", so classic that the age and region cannot be seen (this is why men from California in 2010 The protagonist travels to the beginning of the twentieth century and no one can see the flaws). They live in high-end apartments and high-end hotels. They are engaged in high-knowledge and high-income careers such as screenwriters, professors, and producers. They go to museums, high-end restaurants, wine tastings, and talk about poetry, drama, and artist anecdotes...
despite all The pen and ink are dedicated to the life of the middle class, and Allen's movies, if you carefully savor it, are full of cynicism about this kind of life. Cheating is the most frequent episode: their marriage is unhappy. Those intellectuals are knowledgeable, well-versed in ancient and modern, but they are terribly narrow in the face of multiculturalism. In "Hannah and Her Sisters", the protagonist played by Allen was dragged to an underground rock concert, sitting on pins and needles, and hated that he would bite his tongue for a second. And in "Midnight Paris" Gil’s pair of vulgar prospective parents-in-laws, the hypocritical and stubborn Paul, and the very entertaining Gil’s fiancee said "No wonder my dad said you are a communist", all showing these middle-class parents. Class ignorance and ridiculous.
And how is Gil himself better? In the context of contemporary China, he is a pseudo-literary youth. When I was tired of Hollywood screenwriters, I wanted to write a novel on a whim. Regardless of whether the magic in midnight Paris is true or false, what is he? Why would the peerless lover of Picasso and Hemingway prefer him, the only Yankee? Why is Gertrude Stein praised by Gertrude Stein for writing a novel by a Hollywood screenwriter? Daydream! Just like in previous movies, Woody Allen, who is extremely nervous, short and bald, is always favored by temperament beauties, and the audience just wants to say, why. At the end of the story, Gil meets another French woman who "will miss him suddenly". This is another symbol that runs through Woody Allen's movies: there is a blunt "happy ending" at the end of the drama. Contradictions are always resolved quickly, and reunion is like traveling through time and space so easily.
In reality, Woody Allen himself grew up in the Brooklyn Jewish District, which is not a place where middle-class whites live, but a gathering place for the working class and minorities. However, the atmosphere of his movie only revolves around his surroundings after "success": the Upper East Side. Exhausting all the film and talents to portray the middle-class life, and then overthrow it, even the happy ending is so stiff as to be another mockery-does he hate it or love it? Come on, since all this is a pipe dream, let us enjoy this sensual, magnificent and absurd dream.
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