Well-known American director Woody Allen's new 2011 film, Midnight in Paris, is perhaps the best love letter to Paris.
The opening three-minute "Paris Landscape Show" is full of postcard-like freeze-frame shots. The streets, alleys, squares, open-air cafes, parks, flagstone roads, and the Seine River in Paris are accompanied by morning light, rain, and twilight. With a soft and melodious trumpet, it is simply beautiful. During these few minutes, Woody Allen couldn't even bear to attach subtitles, and the next minute of black-on-white subtitles was accompanied by the dialogue between the hero Gil and the heroine, Gale. His words were full of praise for Paris.
The color of the whole film is honey-like. During the day, it is the freshness of honey and grass, and at night, it is sweet and greasy like a viscous liquid. At night and during the day, every frame is full of doting.
This love letter is also an invitation letter, inviting all romantic people to go to Paris to find romance. It can definitely be regarded as an excellent city image advertisement. What's more, the French First Lady Bruni Sarkozy also personally went into battle for the film, playing a tour guide of the Rodin Museum.
Woody Allen is extremely good at capturing the beauty of cities on camera, he is perhaps the most famous "New Yorker" in the world, and New York is the most important character in most of his films. In recent years, he has turned his lens to Europe, first London, then Barcelona, and now Paris. In an interview with the BBC he said he could have chosen to live in Paris, and sometimes, when it rains in Manhattan, he fantasizes about how nice it would be if this was Paris, but he never actually moved there. So, perhaps with a kind of compensatory mentality, Woody Allen is so generous with his love for Paris in this film.
However, as an intellectual Woody Allen, Paris also means literature, art, the so-called golden age of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Dali and Miss Stein. So he arranged a or more precisely N gorgeous crossings for the male protagonist. Whenever the clock strikes 12 midnight, Cinderella's pumpkin car - here is a classic Peugeot car - will Gayle was brought to the Paris literary circle in the 1920s, accompanied by his various idols, and also robbed Picasso and Hemingway's girl - Adriana played by Marion Cotillard.
So nostalgia becomes the real theme of the film, Gale's and the director's. Gale indulges in his own nostalgia, always wishing he could live in the past, in Paris in the rain. Until he and Adriana traveled back to her golden age, the 1890s with Degas, Gauguin and Maxim's restaurant, and Gauguin and Degas talking about how empty and unimaginative their own age was how good it would be to live in the Renaissance. This is like what Gale said at the beginning of the novel written in the film: "For a generation, ordinary things, even vulgar things, are transformed into magical and exaggerated symbols in the mirror image across time."
In fact, the director It's not necessary to express the theme so blatantly, you can leave some space for the viewer to experience it, but this is typical Woody Allen-like ramble, which makes people want to gag him sometimes. At the same time, this movie is not the director's self-persuasion. It is too obvious that Woody Allen, like Gale, dreams of Paris in the 1920s. His ramble about the true meaning of nostalgia is a kind of repeated self-persuasion. .
However, his persuasion was ineffective. Hemingway's "Flowing Feast" obviously had a lot of influence on the film. The book did not less describe the hardships of Hemingway's life in Paris and the unpleasant places in the literary and artistic circles. But it didn't get in the way of Woody Allen's nostalgia. And in the same way, the film made me, who wasn't very nostalgic, fall in love with Paris in the 1920s. Although every era is modern, when this era passes, no matter how to restore it, it will still become bright and beautiful as if it has been added with a golden filter.
There are also many lovely moments in the movie, such as the Shakespeare bookstore where Gale walks out of the credits (it was written about it in "The Feast of the Flow"), and the private detective hired to spy on Gale actually traveled back to the age of the Louis 10s. went. The private detective also said "Je suis perdu." when he saw the king and queen. I wonder if this is an allusion to the "lost generation" (une génération perdue).
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