Winter First Moon of the New Year
Saw “Midnight in Paris.” Not much of a movie goer, I’m more of a movie bringer, so I tend to see things late. I don’t mind. Kate and I picked this one for our movie night on Friday.
The professor teaching a class in contemporary art theory at the Walker, I took this class back in, what, March, gushed about this movie. A post-modern film. A love letter to the past and present of Paris. A love story.
She was right. This is a wonderful film, a film that challenges our notions of chronos, that says, up front, that the past is never dead; it’s not even past, it’s right here with us. A Faulkner quote from Requiem for a Nun.
Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams play an engaged couple with very different priorities. Hers is to live the rich life with a successful Hollywood screenwriter (Faulkner was one.) and his is to find a garret in Paris and write his novel about a man who owns a nostalgia shop.
A gateway opens to his golden era, the Twenties, when a fancy car from that era stops near him, just after midnight, its passengers hailing him. He get in and discovers he’s riding with F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. Along the way he meets Hemingway and Picasso and Gertrude Stein.
Later, another gateway opens for Owen and Adriana, mistress to Picasso, Hemingway and Braque. This takes them to Adriana’s golden era, the Belle Epoch. There she meets Gauguin, Lautrec and Degas. She decides to stay behind.
Like Murakami’s 1Q84 I’m not sure if this is a great movie, but it might be. It will need more time, more exposure.
It’s lightness almost allows the more profound aspects of its structure to slip away in a froth of Hollywood champagne bubbles. The easy transit between Paris now and Paris then, given physical content, a sense of this is now actuality, occults the truth behind a glittering persona.
Any of us who read seriously, who attend to cinema for more than diversion, who haunt the hallways of museums the world over, who wander ancient ruins or immerse ourselves in ancient languages or religions, who visit places like civil war battlefields or the Hudson Valley looking for the painters inspired by it or any well preserved neighborhood in any major city, those of us to take politics seriously know the truth of Faulkner’s observation.
When wandering the ruins of Angkor in Cambodia, the Khmer kings live again, their great monuments speaking their story in the language of stone and symbol. Walk the streets of Ephesus in Turkey. You stroll with the Romans who lived there. Head over to the amphitheatre where Paul spoke to the Ephesians. He’s still there.
Have you read War and Peace? Then you’ve danced in 19th century Russia. Steppenwolf? You’ve been to the magic theatre. Magic Mountain. The life of a tuberculosis sanatorium. Great Gatsby? American Tragedy? Romance of the Three Kingdoms? You fought in the wars at the end of the Han Dynasty. Monkeys Journey to the West? A trek to India from the heart of Buddhist China.
When I translate Ovid, I encounter him. Words he wrote, arranged, gave meaning and sense and poetics. He is there on the page and I converse with him.
Walk the halls of any art museum and have an encounter. Let’s say Rembrandt’s Lucretia at the MIA. She cries in front of you, her heart broken and her spirit damaged beyond repair. She bleeds, clutches the rope with her left hand. All while remaining regal, somewhat aloof. At this painting you stand in the room with her, at the end of the Roman monarchy occasioned by her grief and her violation while you also stand in Rembrandt’s studio, applying the last bit of paint, perhaps some varnish. Remarkable, wouldn’t you say?