In the film, like the rare items in the thrift store, the artists of the 1920s are enumerated one by one, an essentialist enumeration, which is only related to statues, not art. Therefore, midnight can be repeated almost like a running account, and what midnight shows is only the landscape, the grandstanding landscape, the self-comfort for the current lack of thought and the end of art: the good old times are gone forever, so to lament, Go nostalgic. Even the 1920s were not enough, there was a Renaissance, but the "Renaissance" was also another "classical" revival. In the absence of considerable art historical and philosophical discussion, nostalgia can only be conservative fundamentalism.
The past is not an illusion, and the present is not reality. The film is almost a hybrid: a hallucinatory state of reality with a pseudo-phantom. Illusion, the film never reaches the level of illusion, the vertigo of illusion, the uncertainty of illusion. This is at best the premarital phobia of a crappy second- or third-rate writer, or his daydreaming, Freudian compression, displacement, transformation. The temperament of the artists in the film may have some romantic temperament, but it is far from the modernity of the 1920s. Perhaps, those individualistic moods can be vented, but the temperament of modernity is enough to destroy this Hollywood narrative. Strangely enough, the irony of the film falls far short of self-irony. Avant-garde doesn't mean to say it, or to bluff. The English accent is always too smooth, like one after another midnight dream, as long as the audience is willing to dream, Continental French is just a stumbling decoration.
From beginning to end, the movie just switches back and forth between the nostalgic grand scene and the little mood, and the end goes back to the beginning, nothing has changed. Small sentiment is suitable for seasoning, not for grand narrative.
After all, the illusion of light rain cannot replace the illusion of melancholy.
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