David Matthews

I was skeptical going in to Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, thinking that I might find unconvincing the film’s conceit that has the protagonist stepping out of present-day Paris into his dream Paris of the 1920s, where he meets his heroes, Hemingway, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and a host of others. Far from unconvincing, this little film turns out to be enchanting, rivaling Vicky Cristina Barcelona as the best Woody Allen movie where another actor plays the role that at one time Allen would have taken.

Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is a successful but frustrated Hollywood scriptwriter, a self-described hack who wants to writes novels. He and his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) have accompanied her parents to Paris, where his future father-in-law is closing a business deal with a French company. The film develops slowly at first, in part because Gil and Inez seem such an improbable couple. He is vaguely liberal and hopelessly romantic, she the conventional, somewhat materialistic daughter of wealthy Republicans who admire the Tea Party. He wants to move to Paris after the marriage. She insists on Malibu. As Gil explains later in the film, the two of them share some small things in common, but as for the big things, not so much.

One night, a bit tipsy after a wine tasting, Gil opts to walk back to the hotel while Inez and her friends go dancing. Of course he gets lost and finds himself on a small winding street without a clue where he is. As a clock strikes midnight, a car pulls up and a man insists that Gil join him and his companions. Next thing he knows he is in a 1920s night spot with Cole Porter at the piano and a woman from Alabama named Zelda is introducing him to her husband Scott. In due course he meets Hemingway and the rest, falls for Picasso’s mistress, and has his novel read by Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), who likes it and offers helpful advice.

In the morning’s wee hours Gil leaves his newfound friends and returns to the shabby present, which more and more is made up of petty arguments with Inez punctuated by the gibes of her mother and the suspicions of her father, who wonders where the heck his future son-in-law goes every night on these walks where he says he finds inspiration for the novel he refuses to let anyone read. Each night when the clock tolls midnight he returns to that golden age of his imagination, until one night, after learning that for Adriana, by this time Picasso’s former mistress, the 1920s are the shabby present and La Belle Époque is the golden age, a horse-drawn carriage transports them to that era, where they meet Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, and Gauguin, for whom it is not La Belle Époque but the Renaissance that is the golden age. Aha! Gil experiences an epiphany. The present is always filled with disappointments, so we turn to an earlier age we can see as brighter and full of promise. But it is in the present that we must make our way, where in the end we find our happiness or not at all. Will he stay with Adriana in La Belle Époque? Marry Inez and live in Malibu? Or will he find that even in the often shabby present there may be enchantment and possibility?

The casting, which I have thought questionable in some of Allen’s recent films, is dead on here, as is the denouement. Wilson as Gil is an affable, shambling sort of fellow, far better in the role of aspiring novelist than Josh Brolin in You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger.  He does come off almost too much the innocent abroad, and in his own way is as much the stereotypical American tourist as his future in-laws. For instance, though he is something of a Francophile and for all his romanticization of Paris, he has even less French than I do. It is the kind of role that Woody Allen in his heyday played so well, and perhaps he deserves more credit for his acting than he is generally given. It always just seemed like he was playing himself. Wilson does not play this one as Allen might have, nor does he try to. His Gil is not a deep thinker, maybe even a little shallow, and more vaguely dissatisfied than tormented by existential angst, believable enough as a young man of the 21st century.

Much the same can be said for the suspension of disbelief about the time travel. While Gil has had a quite a bit of wine in him the first time it happens, the drunkenness is not offered as any kind of explanation, nor is dream or hallucination. What happens is inexplicable, as so much in life is inexplicable. Gil rolls with it. They all roll with it. No one remarks or even notices that Gil’s clothes are a little unusual for the 1920s. One night he tries to explain to Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, and Man Ray that he comes from another era. Because they are surrealists, they are puzzled only by the fact that Gil finds this strange.

There is another side to Midnight in Paris, supplementing the storyline but in a way independent of it. That is the film as paean to Paris, the city with the glorious light, Paris in the rain, at midnight, the Paris of cafés, grand boulevards, a rats’ warren of streets old and and narrow, tourist boats plowing down the Seine, book stalls, the Louvre, the Rodin museum, l’Opera, the Tuileries Garden, Versailles, and above all romance in every sense of that word.

Midnight in Paris may be a notch below Woody Allen’s very best. That leaves ample space to be more than a little bit special, a space Midnight in Paris occupies nicely.

David :: Jun.26.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »

It may be better for a film to be outright bad than to frustrate the audience with rich possibility that goes unredeemed. Generally amusing without ever really engaging us, Potiche comes off like a reasonably well done sit-com, good for some laughs, touching on serious themes about women’s place in society and politics, but lacking substantiality as it pinballs from screwball comedy to domestic farce to a finale where Catherine Deneuve breaks out into song.

Suzanne Pujol (Deneuve) is the trophy housewife of the title, a woman whose role is to serve as household decoration and maintain a façade of bourgeois respectability while her husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), runs the umbrella company Suzanne inherited from her father. Robert is a shameless philanderer and a pompous, arrogant, little tyrant at home and in the workplace. Suzanne appears to take his tirades and bullying in stride and to desire no more of life than this comfortable existence where the only demand on her is to keep up appearances in an empty husk of a marriage.

The setting is a small town, the year 1977. The movie opens with the disjointed image of Suzanne running along a country path in a red jogging outfit typical of the era and her hair in curlers. She pauses to take in the quiet calm and beauty of her surroundings, observing among other things two rabbits engaged in sex. Inspired, she takes a notepad and pencil from her pocket and composes an innocuous little poem.

Meantime, the workers in the umbrella factory go on strike over issues such as bonus pay, length of the workweek, and the abominable condition of the toilets. Robert refuses to negotiate, determined to show the workers who is boss. When they respond by holding him hostage, Suzanne takes the reins and proves to be a willing and able negotiator but far from a pushover. She forms an alliance with the communist mayor and member of parliament Maurice Babin (Gérard Depardieu), with whom she had a brief (one day) affair many years earlier. The flame is soon rekindled for Maurice, a gruff hardliner who has given his life to the cause of a workers’ revolution he now thinks might never come. The still willing but somewhat weary warrior of the class struggle is enchanted by the ironic prospect that he might find happiness in love and domestic tranquility. Suzanne puts the kibosh on those dreams, for though she clearly remains fond of Maurice, she will not leave Robert.

Suzanne assumes the mantle of leadership when Robert suffers a heart attack in the aftermath of the strike. She is an adept and successful executive, intelligent, willing to consider the ideas of others, encouraging innovation. Under her guidance the umbrella company expands its markets and becomes more profitable than ever. A power struggle ensues when Robert returns to health eager to resume his position as chief executive only to find that Suzanne is unwilling to step aside. When Robert outmaneuvers Suzanne to win back his position, she does not meekly return to her former life. Instead she decides to enter politics and run against Babin, whose seat in parliament is up for election.

Potiche can be interpreted as a film about Suzanne’s growth as a person and on a broader stage the spread of attitudes about the women’s rights and equality that were largely accepted in cities in 1977 but still not much filtered to small towns and the countryside. There is something to this interpretation, but it fails to take into account indications that all along there was more to Suzanne than met the eye. The emergence of qualities and talents not previously manifest or even suspected comes more in response to the demands of circumstance than from an awakening of ambition or impulse to self-realization and personal growth. What endures from the early Suzanne to the later one is an equanimity that gave her the capacity to empathize with the strikers while remaining true to the interests of management. This same equanimity is evident in her relationship with Robert where there is little sense that she chafes under his domestic tyranny, much less that she is beaten down by it. Rather, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, she more or less has his number.

A minor plot development involves Robert’s vehement and at first puzzling objection to their son’s girlfriend, until Robert reveals that it is possible that he is the girl’s father, and if he is, Laurent (Jérémie Renier) could marry his half-sister. Later Suzanne explains to Robert that this is not a problem, because he is not Laurent’s father. At which Robert leaps to the conclusion that Babin is the father. He is outraged: bad enough to be a cuckold, but to be cuckholded by a filthy communist! Robert confronts Babin and threatens to reveal the scandal. Far from being distressed, Babin is elated by the prospect that suddenly, at his age, out of the blue, he has a son. Alas, Suzanne must disabuse the poor fellow of this notion, explaining that there are two other candidates she thinks more likely than Babin or Robert to be Laurent’s father. Dumbfounded by the revelation, Babin exclaims, “Is that all?” To which Suzanne replies, “In May 1952.” All along there was more to her than meets the eye. The same cannot be said of the film, which is devoid of any emotional and dramatic spark that could have set it off to be at least a little bit special.

Interview with François Ozon

Interview with Catherine Deneuve

David :: Jun.12.2011 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »