It's quarter to midnight and I just got back from seeing "Minuit à Paris"—not at Cannes, unfortunately, but in Paris, which is never unfortunate. Not only is the movie opening at Cannes, but nearly every theater in Paris is running it, and maybe, if Edith Piaf is watching down on us from Heaven, then maybe, just for tonight, it will have been better attended than "Fast & Furious 5" or "Thor." In fact, I think it was.
Last July, as I was attempting to get a photo of a dog near a park behind Notre Dame cathedral (long story), I saw Woody Allen in that fisherman's hat he always wears, waiting for the light to be just right so he could shoot a scene that, come to think of it, probably is on the cutting room floor. In any case, it felt serendipitous to be here for the opening. Better still, I saw it in Montparnasse, our old neighborhood for a year when I was teaching in Versailles. Not a lot of tourists bother going to Montparnasse on their whirlwind tours, but in the 1920s, you could find Hemingway, Dali, Fitzgerald, Man Ray, Cole Porter, Modigliani, Gertrude Stein—you name 'em—wandering around the neighborhood ironically named after the seat of the Greek muses (long before the ugly Montparnasse tower was built, a mound of dirt and stone formed a central eyesore). Now, Woody Allen has taken the entire Pantheon of the roaring '20s, added a few Belle Epoque legends, and a just a dash of Versailles and has made a nostalgic love letter to that Paris we all hope to find.
Owen Wilson plays Gil, a screenwriter who has penned enough successful Hollywood flicks to have earned him a beautiful fiancée—a one-note caricature of a spoiled American who hopes his earnings will mitigate the fact that his politics and ambition do not meet her parents' right-wing ideals. Gil is a bewildered and befuddled dreamer with just the right amount of neuroses to make you realize that he is really an idealized version of Allen himself—a version that could believably have Rachel McAdams as a fiancée and Marion Cotillard as a love interest.
One night, Gil loses his way back to his hotel. Just after the clock chimes midnight, people in an old car invite Gil to hop in, and the next thing you know, he's partying with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, etc. etc. He takes advantage of his new connections to get advice on his novel (which opens in "a nostalgia shop") from the likes of Gertrude Stein (played by Kathy Bates). When the first magical night ends, Gil turns around to find that the Polidor cafe is now a laundromat. He was Cinderella at the ball and now he must return to...his materialistic fiancée at the 5 star hotel. Poor little rich boy.
Never fear. Night after night, he returns, gets pointers on his work, and learns that—surprise—people in his version of the golden age were nostalgic too. Cotillard's character longs to return to the Belle Epoque—the start of a nostalgic mise-en-abyme. It all sounds trite, but the movie transcends its own lack of depth through earnestness. The cynical Parisian public was enchanted, and so was I.
As cliché-ridden and trite as the plot may sound and as one-dimensional as the characters may be, the honesty of the heart-felt nostalgia hits home. Everyone in that theater, American or French, would love to hold on to that magic. But we if we have to go back nearly 100 years to find it, then we're left with Paris as the world's largest museum. If, on the other hand, we realize that our age might become a golden age to some future generation (Lord have mercy), then we have to find the Hemingways of today. We have to go from the Polidor to that laundromat and find beauty in that transformation. But we don't. Woody Allen doesn't know how to love Paris today. Either do most Parisians.
The ending I kept expecting to see (in parallel to the opening shots of the kind of postcard perfect vacant city that only a very expensive filming permit can buy you) was a montage of Paris today, with its mixed races and cultures, its angry youth, its clever graffiti, its DJs, etc. But even when we are brought into the present we are stuck in the past (a pretty young woman who works at a flea market).
I exited the theater, camera bag on my shoulder (as it always is in Paris), ready to snap a couple of shots of what Paris actually looked like. And here is what I saw:
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