Yesterday was a weird day for me. Really weird. Emotional and weird–not like yesterday’s post or anything, just yesterday . Since I feel like writing, but don’t want to mess with any stories or editing or whatever on Saturday, let’s chat about the best film I saw recently. It’s like a digital bowl of comfort ice cream, only with less calories and more Woody Allen.

Midnight in Paris follows a family who travels to the capital of France for business. One’s a screenwriter who wants to turn novelist. The other’s a brat-princess-daughter of some jerk Tea Party capitalist tycoon. Screenwriter and brat are engaged. Brat wants to do lame tourist things. Screenwriter wants to get in touch with his inner self and the city, as if to accommodate him, changes at Midnight into Paris of another era.

To get it out of the way, I liked the film. Maybe even loved it, I don’t know. I’ll have to see it a second time for that. Some of the imagery struck me, the poetry of filmmakers. At the opening scene, we alternate between shots of the oldest portions of the city and the newest, the ancient street lamps and the Eiffel Tower along switch places with new trees and buildings. Every shot includes something tall and slender, something like a phalanx. Shot-by-shot, the sun sets until, of course, it’s Midnight and we’ve gotten a flavor for Paris, almost a timeless Paris, Paris old and new, Paris as an ideal.

For those that haven’t seen the movie, I won’t ruin where it goes, but I will say there’s a bit of time travel involved and it’s used tactfully, not as some hokey plot device. The main theme they explore is Gilded Ages, which of course I loved since I have spent so much time researching the American “Gilded Age,” 1860-1910. Allen keeps asking the question, is there a Gilded Age? If so, when? If not, what does that mean for us in the present?

The film features writers like Hemmingway and Fitzgerald, painters like Picasso and Dalí, and other artists like Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, Luis Brunel, etc. All of them are characterized exactly as we read about them, but watching them interact as regular, everyday people with those character quirks brings them out of isolated history and into the present, forcing us to challenge our own assumptions about masculinity and sex (thus the opening phalanxes) as well as the concept of the past being greater or better or somehow more artistic and purer than the present (thus his alternating shots).

Allen also uses group shots that separate the main character Gil and his fiancé to opposite sides of the screen the few times they share it. At the same time, Allen draws Paul–this know-it-all connoisseur of culture–and Gil’s fiancé together shot-by-shot. This accomplishes more than mere plot points, it helps us to see how out-of-touch with the present Gil really is.

At one point, Gil, the main character says “Screenplays are so much easier than novels.” There’s Allen again, tongue-in-cheek, exposing the pain of his labor. Thanks to the Huckabays for the recommendation.

Anyone else see it?