Lost generation revisited

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
--Hemingway

When I think of Woody Allen, I think of college kids and young people lined up for a block waiting to see his latest movie. We learned to love him for his slapstick comedies. We later felt more adult, with quasi-Jewish sensibilities, watching Annie Hall, Zelig and Manhattan. We puzzled our way through his Ingmar Bergman phase. And then, we sort of lost touch. Now, when I review his list of movies, I realize that he kept directing films, but somehow I was no longer watching them.

But he remains in my mind as a filmmaker who appeals to young people. So it was a bit of a shock to go to the theater tonight, to see Midnight in Paris, and find myself surrounded by silver-haired baby boomers -- to find myself watching his ageing fans struggling up the aisle, easing themselves into seats. Where were the college kids, I wondered? Where were all the young couples?

Well, I guess they're watching Thor. Or Scream 4. Or X-Men: First Class. Or at home on their computers. It's a different generation, with different interests. For me, it's tempting to look back on the 60's and 70's -- when Woody Allen's star first rose -- as a long-lost Golden Age of Cinema.

But, of course, the moral of Midnight in Paris is that there were no actual Golden Ages, that every generation fixes upon some earlier time as its own Golden Age, an imaginary world that it creates in its own mind and imagines with nostalgia.

That may be the film's stated moral, but the cinematography totally undermines this lesson. Paris in the Twenties, in Allen's imagining, is visually a shining display of street lamps reflected from wet cobble stone streets. It's a city of smoky cafés and nightclubs filled with beautiful, clever people, and of salons attended by the greatest concentration of talent ever gathered together in one city since the Renaissance. Allen's Paris is, indeed, a moveable feast.

The film's rather loopy hero, Gil -- acted by Owen Wilson, who looks nothing like Woody Allen, but does an amazing job of imitating Allen's phrasing and tone of voice -- stumbles somehow back in time, and hangs out, improbably, night after night, with Hemingway, Scott and Zelda, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Buñuel, Cocteau, Dali, and the full complement of writers and artists who lived and worked in the Paris of the 1920's.

The plot is silly, the acting often seems a bit stilted, and Gil's present-day fiancée and step parents-to-be are right wing Republicans so stereotypically dull and xenophobic that you wonder what ever possessed Gil to propose to her in the first place. ("We both like pita bread," he explains, trying to find something they have in common.) But the portrayal of celebrities from the Twenties is irresistably interesting, as well as funny. Hemingway speaks in short, "true" sentences -- the way he wrote and the way I doubt he ever spoke. "Anyone want to box?" he asks loudly, as his friends say goodbye and leave the cafe in which they had been drinking.

But most of all, the film is worth seeing just as a romanticized but almost painfully beautiful re-creation of Paris in its by-gone days of glory, as well as a breathtaking travelogue to the Paris of today, a Paris that seems pretty darn "golden" even now.

Maybe Allen's moral is correct. Maybe Paris's Golden Age wasn't really all that golden, maybe every period of history only seems golden to subsequent generations. But you don't really believe it as you walk out of the theater, humming a Cole Porter tune and wondering where you can find yourself a glass of Pernod.