Every nostalgic believes they were born in the wrong era. It is one of the most common fantasies among people who read a lot or know too much about some historical period: the conviction that there was a moment in the past when everything was better, more authentic, more alive, and that one’s personal misfortune was to have arrived late. I know people who would have wanted to live in the Vienna of 1900. People who would have wanted to be in Greenwich Village in the sixties. People who would have wanted to see the Beatles at the Cavern Club. I myself, if pressed, would choose the Buenos Aires of Borges, the cafés on Calle Corrientes in the forties, the arguments at Sur, a world that was probably far less glamorous than I imagine but that I imagine all the same.
Woody Allen understands this because Woody Allen is this. His entire career is an exercise in nostalgia: for the jazz of the forties, for European cinema of the fifties, for the New York that existed before gentrification, for a world where people went to neighbourhood cinemas and ate at cheap Italian restaurants and had intelligent conversations without checking their phones. Allen is quite possibly the most productive nostalgic in the history of film. And in 2011, at seventy-five, he made a movie that looks that nostalgia in the face and says: it’s a trap. A beautiful, irresistible trap, but a trap all the same.
Midnight in Paris is light. It is one of Allen’s lightest films, almost a fairy tale, without the psychological density of Annie Hall or the darkness of Crimes and Misdemeanors or the formal ambition of Husbands and Wives. And that lightness is part of what makes it work, because the thesis it proposes is heavy enough not to need a heavy treatment. Sometimes the best way to say something important is to say it as though it weren’t.
Gil Pender is a Hollywood screenwriter who wants to be a novelist, travelling through Paris with his fiancée and her parents, who are exactly the sort of people a Hollywood screenwriter who wants to be a novelist cannot stand. One night, at midnight, a vintage car picks him up and takes him to the Paris of the twenties, where he meets Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cole Porter, Gertrude Stein, Dalí, Buñuel, Man Ray. It is the nostalgic intellectual’s paradise. It is exactly what Gil always dreamed of. And Owen Wilson, playing Gil, delivers it with a mixture of wonder and gratitude that is entirely convincing, like a kid in a toy shop who can’t believe they let him in.
The scenes set in the twenties are charming. Allen films that Paris with an affection he makes no effort to hide: the lights, the music, the bars, the conversations about art at three in the morning, everything bathed in a golden glow that is intentionally artificial, like an embellished memory, like a postcard. And here is the first layer of the film’s intelligence: Allen knows what he’s showing is a fantasy. He is not reconstructing the real Paris of the twenties, with its poverty, its disease, its antisemitism, its toilets without modern plumbing. He is reconstructing the Paris that nostalgics imagine, which is something else entirely. The film doesn’t deceive the viewer. It deceives the character. Not the same thing.
The turn comes with Adriana. Gil falls in love with her, a fictional woman who moves through that world of geniuses, and one night, walking through twenties Paris, the two of them are transported to yet another past: the Belle Époque, the 1890s, Maxim’s, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Degas. For Adriana, this is paradise. The twenties, her own present, feel empty to her, vulgar, insufficient. She wants to stay in the Belle Époque just as Gil wants to stay in the twenties. And in that moment, Gil understands. If Adriana idealises the 1890s from the 1920s, and he idealises the 1920s from 2010, then someone in the 1890s probably idealised the Renaissance, and someone in the Renaissance probably idealised classical Greece, and so on to infinity. Nostalgia is recursive. It has no floor. Every golden age is someone’s unsatisfying present.
It is a conceptually simple moment but an emotionally complicated one. Simple because the logic is obvious once you see it: if every past was better, then none of them were. Complicated because Gil, and the audience, and Allen himself, don’t want to accept that conclusion. We want the twenties to have really been better. We want nostalgia to be right. And the film, with enormous gentleness, tells us it isn’t, without mocking us for having believed it was.
There is something in that scene I consider one of the most elegant acts of self-criticism in cinema. Allen, who built his entire filmography on the premise that the past was better, who shot Manhattan in black and white with Gershwin on the soundtrack as a declaration of love to a New York that no longer existed, who had his characters quote Kierkegaard and listen to old jazz and go to the cinema to watch Bergman, Allen makes a film in which his own alter ego discovers that this stance is an illness. Not a sensibility, not a refinement, not a superior way of seeing the world. An illness. The inability to inhabit the present because the present never measures up to the image we have of the past, an image that is, by definition, edited, filtered, stripped of everything that made the past a present just as unsatisfying as our own.
Nostalgia as intellectual illness. The phrase sounds harsh but I think it’s accurate. It is an illness because it has recognisable symptoms: chronic dissatisfaction with the present, systematic idealisation of what has already happened, the inability to enjoy what is because it is always being measured against what was, or more precisely, against what we believe was. And it is intellectual because it afflicts above all people who know things, who have read enough history or watched enough film or listened to enough music to construct a detailed and seductive image of another time. The ignorant are not nostalgic because they have nothing to be nostalgic about. The well-read are nostalgic precisely because their knowledge lets them imagine with precision a world they never lived in.
Gil returns to the present. That is the resolution. He doesn’t stay in the twenties, doesn’t stay with Adriana, doesn’t choose the fantasy. He goes back to 2010, leaves his fiancée, stays in Paris, and starts walking in the rain with a girl he met at an antique shop. It is a modest ending, nearly anticlimactic, and it is exactly the right one. Because what Gil has learned is not that the present is better than the past. It is that the present is what there is. That life is lived in the time you were given, with the people you were given, and that idealising it in retrospect is a way of not living it.
Allen doesn’t go so far as to say nostalgia is useless. It would be odd if he did, given that nostalgia is the fuel for half his films. What he says is something more nuanced: that nostalgia is a pleasure that turns to poison when you stop visiting it and start living in it. That remembering the past with fondness is human, but that wanting to live in the past is a form of cowardice, a way of avoiding the difficulty of being alive now, with all the imperfections and vulgarities and disappointments that entails.
It is, in its way, a Catholic argument, or at least compatible with one. The Catholic tradition values the past, memory, continuity with what came before. But it also insists that life is here and now, that vocation is fulfilled in the present, that escaping from time is a temptation and not a virtue. There is a difference between honouring the past and fleeing into it, and that difference is exactly what Gil discovers walking through the streets of a Paris that exists in 2011 and not in 1925.
Midnight in Paris does not cure nostalgia. No film can cure anything. But it diagnoses it with a precision that disarms, and it diagnoses it from the inside, from someone who suffers from it and knows it.