Ernest Hemingway & Midnight in Paris: A Discourse on Nostalgia
There are strangely few mentions of Ernest Hemingway’s novel ‘A Moveable Feast’ in connection with Woody Allen’s 2011 film ‘Midnight in Paris’. Allen never mentions having read the book or citing it as an inspiration when writing the film. There are instances during its runtime where the words “a moveable feast” are spoken, and a physical copy does appear in one scene. Other than that, the official story of Allen’s writing the script comes from his own stay in the Ritz Paris. Allen attributes his major muse for penning the script to the actual sentence ‘Midnight in Paris’. What happens at midnight? He did not actually know when he started writing it.
“I have a tendency to romanticize Paris. When the lights come up and it’s almost midnight, everything looks so pretty.” — Woody Allen
It would be wonderful if an old car pulled up to the side of the road each midnight in some backstreet, away from the endless droves of tourists that plug up Paris’s romantically beautiful streets. Hopping in so that you could find yourself — after a short drive — sitting by the Seine on the Left Bank with a paper in hand, watching as Ford Maddox Ford waltzes by; he talks poorly to the staff. Or sipping absinthe with Hemingway at Les Deux Magots, or the Place Saint-Michel. Dining on choucroute garnie with Picasso at La Rotonde.
If only such things had been possible, and not merely reserved for the pages of Midnight in Paris’ fantasy-romance script. There are other means of experiencing this Paris, than through a magical time-portal-car; the one that Allen seemingly longs for, as well as our protagonist Gil Pender.
There is, of course, Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, where the scattered beauty and nostalgia for this Paris is forever preserved. Both Hemingway’s novel and Allen’s film have this distinct thread of nostalgia. A wistful or excessively sentimental yearning to return to some past period or irrecoverable condition.
A Good Café on the Place St.-Michel
Owen Wilson’s understated Gil: a writer and a “victim of that old Hollywood joke,” says Allen, is a man whose own life is adrift. That old joke is on him: “I laid down at the pool… and when I got up it was ten years later.”. Time has passed him by. Coming off the back of successful screenplays, Gil has found himself in a rut, experiencing writers’ block for the first time. He and his wife Inez (Rachel McAdams) have flown to Paris, where he hopes to reignite his writing spark. Gil has been here before as a young man, just as Allen himself had been for his directorial debut. Paris for Gil is wistful; it’s a place where “he thought about what he was going to do with his life. That was when he came to the fork in the road.” Says Owen Wilson. A place to “…think about that time and the road he didn’t take.” Under the conceit of writing this new novel, Gil’s time in Paris is a reprieve. His editor will no longer pester him, and he’ll have time to finish the book. Unironically, Gil’s protagonist of his own novel works in a nostalgia store “Selling knick-knacks” and other such things from the past.
Hemingway makes brief appearances in Allen’s film, played in a stalwart and laconic fashion by Corey Stoll. Alongside him are a veritable who’s who of writers and artists of the 1920’s: The inimitable Gertrude Stein (Cathy Bates), F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody).
Not only are Hemingway’s appearance in the film uniquely ‘Hemingway’, in a sense that he’s almost been Flanderized, speaking exactly as he writes, his appearances are a love letter to the written word. Hemingway serves as an icon for Gil. Upon meeting him, Gil fauns over Hemingway’s own love of Mark Twain: “I think you can make the case that all modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn.”, which Hemingway famously said himself.
Thematically, Allen’s film has much in common with Hemingway’s own depiction in ‘A Moveable Feast’ of the bohemian Paris of 1920. Both are a discourse on nostalgia, as well as serving as valentines for writing; Allen says so himself through his Hemingway, portrayed by Stoll:
“No subject is terrible if the story is true, and if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”
At its core, Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, a posthumously released memoir, is intrinsically linked with a world — explicitly a Paris — that no longer exists. A book that is as much about a young writer’s journey, as it is about life in its totality. There is more to it than that, though. Like Allen after him, Hemingway seems to have been an avid exponent of the ‘American Francophile’. The idea of the idealistic country, brimming with culture and romance. It opens with this quote from Hemingway himself, for which the novel gains its title:
‘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.” — Ernest Hemingway
The short novel, comprising of 192 pages, is pure romanticism, much like Allen’s infatuation with a long-forgotten Paris, and the ideal that most American’s hold for it. Hemingway, in his later years, remembers fondly this Paris of his youth. The novel features a somewhat romanticised version of ‘Papa’ Hemingway himself, just as Midnight in Paris does. From his younger infatuation with an already famous James Joyce, interactions with F.Scott Fitzgerald and a pre-publication reaction to The Great Gatsby .Hemingway purportedly wrote his memoirs over a series of decades, although it was never finished, and published by his widow Mary Welsh Hemingway. It has since become one of his most treasured works, not only for its insights into Hemingway himself, but into a world that is no longer able to be experienced. It belongs to a time so far removed, that all we know of it now is that old hat saying: Une Generation Purdue, the lost generation. For Hemingway, that comprised of writers, artists, musicians. Seemingly adrift in a world that had seemingly lost its way. Reeling from the Great War and all the costs that came with it, whether those be in physical terms, or in idealistic.
There Is Never Any End to Paris
Midnight in Paris is as much about the dangers of nostalgia as it is a celebration of it. There are the obvious sequences of dinner parties with the Fitzgerald’s while Cole Porter plays loving renditions of ‘Let’s fall in love’ on the piano. Gil becomes outwardly disconnected with the world, one that seems evidently disinterested in him. Inez and her parents think of him as a loser, leading to her eventual cheating and Gil falls in love with Adriana (Marion Cotillard). Adriana, a fictionalised Pablo Picasso muse, who shows Gil that life is worth living. Eventually, after a tryst and a love triangle, Gil realises he wants to live in the 1920s full time with Adriana and goes to her in the films climax.
In these final beats, Adriana and Gil travel even further back in time, leaving Gil with a valuable lesson that nostalgia is a constant: Adriana herself falls into Gils own trappings, feeling nostalgic for this Paris of an even yester yester-year. Gil ponders that “If you stay here, and this becomes your present then pretty soon you’ll start imagining another time was really your… golden time. That’s what the present is. It’s a little unsatisfying because life is unsatisfying.”. Living in the past is not all it’s cracked up to be, you have to move on with your life. Hemingway writes in the closing pages of Moveable Feast: “… You live day by day and enjoy what you have and do not worry… There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.”
There is a happy ending to Gil’s time in Paris — he meets another woman, removed from both Inez and Adriana. One who likes Paris in the rain as it is today, much like this new Gil, one who has learned from the experiences of the past. You can love the past, but you cannot live in it. Living in the here and now is what is most important. Hemingway, too, found another woman. His marriage ended in the snowy alps of Italy and Switzerland, for Hemingway there wasn’t enough love for just one woman; it ended up being around four. Woody Allen helps us discover that it is not the past that is truly beguiling but the present, and indeed what is yet to come. While Hemingway wishes desperately to return to a place that is no longer there; Paris would never be the same, partly for decisions he had made, and partly because “Paris was never to be the same again although it was always Paris and you changed, as it changed”. But, like Rick Blaine says to Ilsa in Casablanca: “We’ll always have Paris”.
Written by Declan Durrant
