Ghosts
Ghosts
Postcards from the Dead
On Thursday, A and I went to watch Woody Allen’s latest Midnight in Paris. I can see how it has become his biggest box office hit in years. It touches upon that feeling that many of us feel: how wonderful it would be to live in another time. For the Woody Allen stand-in in this film, Owen Wilson, that time is Paris in the 1920’s, a city that seems to have lived best at night with its parties and bars filled with writers and painters and many expats drifting lost abroad.
It was funny hearing the audience —I was surprised to see the cine had a crowd, I’m not used to seeing so many people coming out to watch a Woody Allen film in the US—, the applauses and laughs when a major cultural character would pop up on the screen, look there’s Picasso! Hemingway! Stein! Dalí! Buñuel! Whereas in earlier films like Manhattan or Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the city —Manhattan, Barcelona— is the focal point, the establishing shots of the Manhattan skyline set to Gershwin, the shots of famous Barcelona landmarks —the city as postcard—here it is a particular time period. There are images of Paris of course, because sometimes his films sell really well a particular city (driving along the Hudson River parkway at night with the skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan to my side always made me feel like I was in Manhattan), primarily in an opening montage of the best sights of the city: there’s Seine, there’s the Pont Neuf, there’s Place de la Concorde, there’s the Eiffel Tower, there’s Sacre Couer, there’s Notre Dame, there’s the Louvre, etc. In this montage, and a few others throughout the film, Allen offers up the tourist postcards of a city that even if you have never been there, you already know.
Don’t get me wrong I like Paris a lot. But I was left wondering why Allen didn’t show the Centre Pompidou or the arch at Place de la Defense.
But again, aside from these postcards of the romantic Paris Allen offers up postcards of a specific time period. The characters who pop in and out of the scene are that, postcards from the dead, instead of establishing shots, establishing characters.
He is not the first to do this, of course, and what ultimately won me over about this movie was that he also made almost no attempts at telling the audience that these are Important People, living in an Important Time, unlike what happens in the film Frida, directed by Julie Taymor and starring Salma Hayek. There, in the recreation of the Mexico City intellectual scene of the 1930’s, the film fails even more than it does in other aspects. The characters —look there’s Trotsky! Look there’s André Breton! Look there’s David Alfaro Siquieros! Wait, why is Antonio Banderas playing Siqueiros?— all speak as if they know they are a part of History and given to grandiose declarations and larger than life emotions. They speak not to their peers, but to an audience, to posterity. It’s all very boring. And this is where Allen does well. His characters may have been aware of their own importance (Hemingway certainly does), but they are also people making a living in a city.
After watching Frida years ago I thought of my circle of friends and the times that we were living. Did we talk like that? Did we speak as if every one of our utterances was going to be painted in gold and set on a marble slab?
Fortunately we were more mundane than that. Back then only one of my friends had one a major literary award, another who would later win one of the most prestigious literary awards in Spanish and be compared with Vargas Llosa was a struggling writer living in a cheap flat in Madrid, with one of my friends who would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize I would wander around comic book shops with in New York City. With a group of friends, including a performance artist friend who won a MacArthur “Genius” Award I spent an evening wandering around the immigrant quarter of Barcelona. I remember going to a house party in Mexico City for a friend who had just received a Guggenheim. The party was filled with actors, writers and painters. Butt I don’t recall anyone acting out and making large statements. Rather, it was a gathering of friends hanging out and celebrating. We were a bunch of friends walking in New York, going out in Mexico City, drinking in bars and eating in restaurants in Madrid or in Barcelona.
This is what struck me about Midnight in Paris, the interactions of the characters as almost normal, though we may no longer view them in the light of history as that, normal people living in their time, doing things for their time.
The film also raises an interesting question. If you could go back to live in a prior time, what would it be and would you do it? I thought about it a while, tossed around the idea of Paris in the 1920’s or Mexico City in the ’30’s. But then I realized that no, I like the time in which I am living now.
Saturday, July 2, 2011