Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen's Golden Age
This year's Cannes Film Festival, the main news of which was mainly related to scandals, opened with an out-of-competition screening of Woody Allen's painting Midnight in Paris - and this is nice to remember, because there were no conflicts around it.Gil (Owen Wilson) is a successful screenwriter who dreams of writing a novel in his heart and is obsessed with the charm of the twenties, arrives in Paris with his catastrophically modern bride and is constantly tormented by the desire to dodge another dinner with her rich parents or highbrow friends. Suddenly his fantasies materialize - he finds himself in the Paris of his dreams, getting into a car at midnight, which appeared out of nowhere in an alley; a car with a cheerful company takes him to a restaurant. There he meets the Fitzgeralds couple, then - Hemingway and further, as a guide, all the iconic characters of this period (including the spectacular appearance of Salvador Dali in the eccentric performance of Adrian Brody). After making sure that the car appears in the alley regularly, Gil begins to spend all his Parisian nights in the twenties. There he will find a romantic story, a philosophical insight, and, of course, classical problems of self-determination. Midnight in Paris continues in the director's filmography not only a tour of European capitals, but also his favorite topic of dialogue with culture - in the truest sense of the word "dialogue", because we are talking about a conversation with living idols. Woody Allen has worked hard in his lifetime in order to strengthen the right of comedies to master "heavy" intellectual heights. What is love and death alone, in which he made the hard way of comprehending the classics of USA literature in order to turn it into comedy material, understandable to the viewer on both sides of the ocean. Or Play It Again, Sam !, where the ghost of Hollywood actor Humphrey Bogart gives the hero advice on how to arrange his personal life, which only confuses the incomparable protagonist played by Allen himself. The main thing, what is in these films - and that in general it was always possible to give Woody Allen credit - is his persistent desire to remove unnecessary pathos from the situation, to defend the right to conduct a dialogue with the classics on an equal footing. According to Allen, it turns out that the artist who inspires you is not an idol at whose feet you bring sacrifices and sighs, but an interlocutor with whom you can simply take and talk on an equal footing, albeit in your imagination. This idea is very valuable - and it develops at Midnight in Paris to the status of a mission statement. but an interlocutor with whom you can simply take and talk on an equal footing, albeit in your imagination. This idea is very valuable - and it develops at Midnight in Paris to the status of a mission statement. but an interlocutor with whom you can simply take and talk on an equal footing, albeit in imagination. This idea is very valuable - and it develops at Midnight in Paris to the status of a mission statement. In addition, in the film, you can find other topics for a serious conversation - for example, the cyclical nature of culture: after all, each of the heroes sees his own mythical "Golden Age" and wants to return to it. Here the eternal question arises - was there ever a true "Golden Age" in culture? A detailed examination of this topic might even get a little boring if the film, in fact, was about this - but, thank God, it is about something else. The center of this whole story is the unchanging couple with a crisis in relations and the romantic hero in search of his own happiness. Thanks to this, Midnight remains an absolutely Allen film, and Paris, filmed like a postcard, appears as a decoration skillfully played by a grateful newcomer-director who fell under his charm. There is news that the master is staging his next film in the capital of Italy - let's hope Woody Allen's new film will be on USA screens from October 6 this year. Nailya Golman The Topic of Article: Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen's Golden Age. |
