The Road to Fellini's Realism

Note: For anyone who has followed this blog from the beginning or even just glaced at my profile picture, will know that La Dolce Vita is my favourite movie and Federico Fellini my favourite filmmaker. Over the summer the TIFF Bell Lightbox has been hosting a retrospective of Fellini's work as well as presenting a gallery of images dedicated to him. This coming Sunday I will be seeing Nights of Cabiria on the big screen as well as La Dolce Vita come the end of August. I'm sure I'll have something to say about both when the time comes but until then I publish this essay in anticipation.

The road is a metaphor that could very well describe the entire career of Federico Fellini, whose films, in one way or another, all revolved around a journey of self discovery. So it is ironic that his film, in which respected film critic Roger Ebert called the first “that can be called entirely "Felliniesque"(1994), would be called The Road. In a way it’s a starting point from which Fellini himself would take a journey of self-discovery, establishing the very images, motifs and themes that all of his later work would revolve around. Some of which would be the tone that Fellini’s films created by a rejection of the typical characters found in the neo-realism genre which Fellini was born from as discussed by Peter Bondanella in his book The Films of Federico Fellini. There is also the constant contrast between the circus and religion as discussed by Edward Murray in his book Fellini the Arstist, and finally the constant quest of self discovery that Fellini’s characters take in which they often find themselves trapped somewhere between heaven and earth as discussed by Donald P. Costello in his book Fellini’s Road.


In his book The Films of Federico Fellini, Peter Bondanella talks of Fellini’s departure from his roots as a maker of Italian Neorealist films. Having started in this genre as a writer for Roberto Rossili, Fellini soon abandoned his roots on his third film La Strada, by presenting characters and a plot that surpassed what was found within the neorealist genre. According to Bondanella, “Perhaps his departure from neorealist practice in rejecting the idea of film character as social type is the most important divergence from neorealist practice; but equally important is the fact that the plot and visuals of La Strada reject easy classification as a realistic story of social exploitation” (51-51). If neorealism was thought to have moved cinema away from the Hollywood “dream factory” (43) and into the streets of war torn Europe (43), then Fellini was taking it back into a dream world. According to Bondanella, “Fellini agreed with both Rossellini and Antonioni that Italian cinema needed to pass beyond a dogmatic, Marxist approach to social reality, dealing poetically with other equally compelling personal or emotional problems”(53). Hence, La Strada was born. More so then any of Fellini’s previous films, it was a parable about childlike innocence; about finding the purpose that God put you on earth to fulfill. La Strada therefore gave birth to an even newer realism; Fellini’s realism.

It was easy to see that Fellini’s films, particularly his characters, did not so much offer depictions of realism. Instead they acted as a part within Fellini’s fables. In neorealism it was believed that films should “stress social context” (Bondanella, 43). Fellini rejected this idea; his films were more like a process of working out their maker’s own spiritual life journey through the use of allegory and fable. As Bondanella writes, “More than a story, La Strada is a fable about symbolic figures, and its plot structures this origin in the fable or fairy tale” (52). The way Fellini’s films are structured, La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, and La Dolce Vita in particular, is that they both begin and end at the sea; they come full circle back to their beginnings. For Fellini, especially as a Roman Catholic, this book ending represented a new beginning for his characters, a chance for spiritual redemption. Bondanella offers this explanation: “Rather than viewing the world from the perspective of class struggle or class conflict, La Strada embodies a profoundly Christian emphasis upon the individual and the loneliness of the human condition” (54). In using the image of the sea, Fellini is showing the viewers that his films are not about the underpinnings of a Marxist society, but rather the choices of an individual journey; the journey away from the birthplace and back, in an attempt to find, not a place within society, but a place within the spiritual universe. In Fellini’s reality, faith takes precedence over class.

Besides the road, there are two other images that constantly appear throughout Fellini’s body of work, usually appearing in conflict with one another. One of these images is that of the circus: a place of spontaneity and life, a place where it is the norm to think the unthinkable, to believe the unimaginable. To Fellini, the circus was a place of great imagination and invention. Edward Murray in his book Fellini the Artist states that “Where the circus…appears directly in his pictures, it stands as a metaphor, a device for revealing life as a funny- sad experience with cosmic significance” (232). Indeed, to Fellini, a man who liked to create his own reality, whether it was derived from his own life, or a life he had made up, the circus was a place of unending imagination.

The circus however was not the only part of Fellini’s realism. Fellini was a director who was constantly trying to work out the dual nature of reality, trying to blur the lines between the “real and the ideal” (Murray,234). Thus Fellini’s films present a reality that was not the same one that the neorealists dealt with. Rather it was one that was Fellini’s itself, a world in which imagination and performance were held in the highest regard, and thus the circus was always in constant conflict with the church. In reality, the church reined supreme in Rome, and this is why it was under constant comparison to the circus. As Murray helps us understand, Fellini was constantly trying to show us life’s poles, that every road has two paths, more importantly, “life as it is, and life as it ought to be” (234). Throughout his films Fellini constantly presents the audiences with two versions of life. The life that we have, which is one of banality, hurt and sorrow, and most importantly of displacement, and the life that we could have if we lived a little better, were a little more loving, and lived with a little more direction; a true dolce vita.

For Fellini the circus offered direction where the church did not. The church to Fellini “(S)tands for an inauthentic way of life, since it tends to thwart man’s expansive capacities” (Murray,30). The reality of the church was that it presented a strict way of life, a doctrine that was to be accepted and lived by. To Fellini the church undermined an individual’s imagination. The church was not concerned with poles. In Fellini’s eyes, the church only saw one way to live; their way, which Murray helps to illustrate in pointing out that “(H)is attitude towards the Church is a rebellious one” (31). Murray goes on to state that this is because “(T)he polarities that distinguish the Fellinian universe guarantee the director a sufficiently rich assortment of themes with which to capture the interest of the intelligent viewer, who invariably likes to be shown the different sides of every experience”(31). Alas, the church and the circus need each other. If the church only shows us one side of what life should be, Fellini needed the circus to show us the other.

Although Gesulmina in La Strada never comes into such direct conflict with the church as Fellini’s later characters such as Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957) or Marcello (La Dolce Vita, 1960) would, we are still able to get a glimpse of how the circus functioned in Fellini’s realism. The poles in this film revolve around the circus and the world outside which in a way, mimics the reality of neorealism; life in a working class society. We see that Gesilmina is unhappy to hear of her sister’s passing and that she will have to take her place alongside Zampano and his traveling circus-like act. Yet it is when she is performing that reality slips away and for a brief moment, she is happy. The circus is able to strip reality away and offer hope when all seems hopeless. That’s the brilliance of Fellini’s realism, when life seemed to be going bad, there were fantasy places like the circus, or on a larger, more metaphorical scale, Fellini’s films themselves, to escape to in order to find comfort and happiness.

Coming back to the metaphor of the road, in his book Fellini’s Road, Donald P. Costello states that “Throughout all his films, Fellini is concerned with the road of life” (5). There is no doubt that one of the main themes throughout all of Fellini’s films is that of a spiritual journey, of a character who is caught between Heaven and Earth, who must journey down this road in order to find their placement in life. To reinforce this idea, Costello states: “Both thematically and formally, a Fellini film is a journey toward discovery of the essential self” (5). In the director’s own words: “(E)ach time I am telling the story of characters in quest of themselves, in search of a more authentic source of life, of conduct, of behavior, that will more closely relate to the true roots of their individually” (Fellini in Costello, 2). This journey usually must be taken, as Fellini’s characters often find themselves trapped between the earth and the sky. In La Strada, The Fool represents the sky and Zampano the Earth. Similarly 8 ½ finds it’s main character Guido being held to earth only by a rope around his foot, and in La Dolce Vita, Marcello is caught between a flying statue of Jesus and a monster from the sea.

In a similar sense, Costello breaks down the three characters of La Strada into a trinity which involves The Child of the Sea (Geselmina), the Spirit of the Sky (The Fool) and the Man of Earth (Zampano) ( 23, 18 and 27 respectively). These three elements, in one form or another, come to represent the spiritual journey that Geselmina, Cabiria, Marcello, Guido, etc, will all have to take along their road to spiritual fulfillment. It is important to note that each of these journeys end with their character’s finding their way back to be offered the possibility of redemption at their place of origin: the sea. For Fellini the sea represented several things. It represented the innocence of youth, the feminine and most importantly, the beginning of life (Costello, 6). It is at the sea in La Strada where Geselmina, although dead, can complete the purpose of her spiritual journey, which was to help Zampano to understand his loss and find redemption on the beach. In a way, although tragic on the surface, the final scene in which Zampano cries on the beach is a baptism for this man, a rebirth which offers a way to start over on a new path of life. This is ultimately the possibility that Fellini presents all of his characters with at the end of his films, some of whom accept it (Cabiria) and some who don’t (Marcello).

Fellini’s films constantly presented a spiritual journey down the road of life. Through three specific texts based on the director’s work, we can see that this journey stood in constant contrast with the Italian Neorealism movement, which presented characters trying to find their place within a Marxist society. We also see that Fellini was constantly contrasting the church with the circus to show us how he viewed the importance of life and imagination. His films also constantly showed the struggle of a character who was stuck somewhere between Heaven and Earth. Through all of these themes and ideas, Fellini was able to create a realism that was not the one that was shared by his audience but one that existed all to himself: a Fellini realism.

Justify Your Shitty Taste: Knowing

Here’s an interesting query: You’re running late for work and in one of those “doh” moments can’t find your keys, only to realize they are in your pocket. The whole ordeal only takes about thirty seconds out of your day but, while approaching a stop sign on the way a car appears out of nowhere and runs it. If you hadn’t had that momentary lapse, you very well could have been road kill.


Question is: was our losing the keys just a random hiccup of the brain or part of a preordained destiny? How easy it is to take for granted that stopping to tie a shoe, turning left instead of right, looking down instead of up, etc. could potentially be the difference between life of death. But whose terms do we really operate on, ours or the universes?

Think before deciding. If life is random than we simply go through the motions until our death and everything is meaningless, but if life is predetermined, free will is an extinct commodity, ultimately thwarting many religious and political debates as every suicide or abortion were already planned by a being greater than our human capacity could ever comprehend. If I’m writing this because it’s my destiny, then you’re reading it for the same reasons.

These are the things that entered my mind while watching Alex Proyas’ Knowing, which does something rare for this day and age: it manages to be both a stunning entertainment and unimaginably intelligent. It’s a rare science fiction film that doesn’t compromise its integrity by throwing it away to spectacle.

Knowing is a film that asks its audience to sit, watch, listen and, most importantly, pay attention while it spins its tale of destruction. So rare is it that a film stretches itself without apology to the very limits of its narrative possibilities (even if that means into the realms of the preposterous) these days that it is mistaken as bad filmmaking. Knowing is a film that, like all great science fiction, knows that art is a vehicle for raising questions, not giving them arbitrary answers.

Nicholas Cage stars as John Koestler, a professor of astrophysics who believes that the universe is comprised of a series of random events after his wife was killed while out of town when her hotel catches fire. John has a young son named Caleb who receives a mysterious paper covered in random numbers when a ceremony is held at his school to unlock a time capsule buried fifty years prior. The paper was written by the disturbed Lucinda Embry whose assignment for the capsule was to draw a picture of how she though the future would look.

What John slowly begins to realize after analyzing the paper is that the numbers form a code, predicting all of the disasters that will precede the end of the world. The numbers provide the date of the tragedy, the body count and the coordinates of the location. According to the code there are three disasters left before the world ends, all three of which, visually speaking, set a new standard in what special effects can achieve.

As John becomes obsessed with the code he desperately tries to track down the late Lucinda’s daughter for answers. Meanwhile, Caleb begins being visited by strange, darkly cloaked men whose constant whispers in his head also afflicted the young Lucinda and seem to be telling him something. Is Caleb a messenger for God or a victim of his own psyche?

Proyas, whose Dark City was also a (very different) masterpiece about the nature of human existence, takes what could have easily been a mindless entertainment (as the trailers make it out to be) or an absolute train wreck (as it would have been under original helmer Richard Kelly) and infuses it, not only with mind bending special effects, thrilling chases, and gripping storytelling, but with complex and intelligent images that are constantly contradictory to one another. At its heart Knowing is a constant battle between science and theology, the possible and the divine, the physical and the metaphysical, and so on. It, like The Dark Knight and Watchmen will be the central focus of many scholarly essays to come

The brilliance of the film, and arguably most of its suspense, lies in how it is never quite willing to tip the scales in favor of one side. I dare not even hint at the outcome of the story, which is next to impossible to predict, but to draw attention to how even the circumstances that govern it cannot simply be pegged down to that of the scientific or the Biblical. Can it be that one becomes real, or at least possible, in light of the other? Or will they constantly cancel each other’s integrity out: the Bible explaining everything that science can’t and science explaining everything the Bible can’t? What does that say about the nature of our existence? It may be easy to write the conclusion of this film off as improbable, but the debates it raises are real and, like all great science fiction, it believes in them down to the very last frame.

It’s truly rare these days to find a film whose vast intelligence is not confined to the insufficient demands of the running time, nor whose ideas are limited to the images on screen. A film whose musings slowly slip from the screen and out into the world because they are larger and more important than just getting a story from beginning to end. A film that is, to top it all off, one hell of a thrill ride. Yes, films like that are rare. Knowing is exactly one of them.

A Call To All Bloggers: Justify Your Shitty Taste

There's a metal magazine called Decibel which I've never read before but their content is always linked on a a popular metal blog called Metal Sucks that I read all of the time.

One of my favourite columns that Metal Sucks always links to is "Justify Your Shitty Taste" in which a reviewer picks an album out of a bands catalogue that is considered by the masses to be a huge embarrassment or misstep in their career and writes a piece justifying why it is that they actually like it.

So, in order to rip off a good idea when I see one, I'm putting out a call to all movie bloggers to justify their own shitty taste.

It's simple: sometime this week, pick a movie that you like that the vast majority of critics and fans have hated and tell us why you think you are right and why everyone should give this movie a second chance.

Then come back here, post the link in the comments section and at the end of the week I will gather all of the links and post them in one place for everyone to enjoy. Let's make this fun and give people a reason to go back and rethink movies that got to critical brush off the first time around.

Captain America

Captain America, I suppose, has to be admired on some basic level, as all film with a certain degree of competence deserve to be admired, in which one can appreciate the acting, the direction, the visual aesthetic and the action. It’s a complete package with the bow on top. Nothing less and not much more either.

I guess one can primarily admire it for it’s having a real human character at the centre of it. Most comic book movies these days are animated video games with human faces that pop up amidst the computer generated effects. Captain America has a lot of that kind of stuff too but it also has a little comedy and a little heart as well. It has, above all, a hero who provides a human centre for the story; one who you could get behind. Not enough to put it in line with Iron Man or The Dark Knight to be sure, but enough to safely say, without much irony, that it’s better than, say, the Transformers movies. Faint praise is still praise, no?

For those who don’t know, Captain America is about Steve Rogers (Chris Evens) a small awkward kid who wants nothing more than to serve in the army and fight for his country in the war. He enlists under several different names but with a list of ailments a mile long is denied at all of them. The kid has guts and heart though and isn’t afraid to take a back alley beating or two from the local bully when need be.

Trying to enlist one final time at the World Fair where Howard “father of Tony” Stark (Dominic Cooper) unveils his first hover car, Rogers is discovered by Dr. Erskine (Stanely Tucci), a German scientist who fled to America away from Johann Schmidt aka Red Skull (Hugo Weaving), a ruthless Nazi who believes he can harness the power from some glowing cube in order to rise above Hitler and win the war.

Erskine, wanting to use this unexplained power for good, selects Rogers as a test subject much to the cynicism of Colonal Chester Phillips (Tommy Lee Jones doing Tommy Lee Jones) and the admiration of potential love interest Peggy Carter (Haley Atwell). Regardless, once injected with this mysterious power, Rogers exits the experiment a muscle bound hunk with amazing physical power.

He is first put to use as an American hero selling war bounds but once he learns that his friend has been captured behind enemy lines and presumed dead, Captain America single handily goes behind enemy lines, infiltrates Red Skull's operation, saves the men and sends Red Skull into a rage.
All of this is all fine and dandy and made with style and humour. Director Joe Johnson does a good job of creating the look and feel of an old newspaper serial of the time and he takes special care of ensuring that there is a human story amidst all the special effects and the action.

However, if there is any problem with this concept it is that, while stacked up against other Marvel comic book films that have defined the genre such as Spider-Man or Iron Man, Captain America simply doesn’t have much personality. Evans in the lead role doesn’t have the charisma or charm to pull off Rogers' sweet naivety even after he becomes Captain America, and Weaving, a great character actor in his own right, isn’t given the kind of depth that goes into making a great villain, especially one as iconic as Red Skull.

And that’s Captain America: a film that is, in these summers of excess, better than most, but not nearly enough to achieve anything close to memorable. Comic book movies used to be based on relatable characters with human traits put into a narrative that doesn’t cross real life, but runs in such a way parallel to it that it’s pointed yet simple messages can jump across the divide and connect with us. Captain America sets up all the elements to get the first thing right but doesn’t come close enough to approaching the second. Too bad.

Expecting Good Criticism

The expectation argument is the worst form of criticism out there. I take that back. As someone who has written extensively on the nature of criticism as a practice and an art form unto itself within this space I can more accurately say, it's not even criticism at all. It's just plain lazy as well. It's a cheap and quick excuse to not give a film the time and energy to understand what it did and how you interacted with it, and it's also a form of passing the buck because, of course, if so many other people wouldn't have liked it so much you could have liked it more.

Arguing expectations is like drawing lines in the sand and seeing how the tide comes in. If you draw the line close to the water you don't expect much of the tide and if your line gets washed away your expectations have been exceeded. You can do the same in reverse. The point is is that criticism is not drawing lines in the sand. It's about relating to the water and understanding it's movement and drawing a line based on your feelings and findings in which the water can meet, and balance has been achieved.

Because, to get to the point of all that, criticism is about you in relation to the movie. Expectations are about you in relation to what you've heard. If a movie is better than you expected that doesn't make it a good movie and to expect a movie to be better than what you felt it was does not make it bad. To do this is to judge, as Roger Ebert always argued against, the movie you wanted to see and not the one that has been put in front of you.

Of course justifiable expectations will always exist. When I watch a new Ingmar Bergman movie that I haven't seen I expect it to be great as Bergman has a track record for making great movies. But if one happens to not meet those expectations this does not mean the film is to be thrown away, considered lesser Bergman, mean it deserves a bad review or any such variable. What it means is that I have some thinking to do. If I watched the Seventh Seal and didn't agree with the critical majority that it's one of the best films ever made the problem is with me not the film and it's up to me to reflect back and understand why this film has been deemed to be such, and in most cases, with both personal and analytical reflection, the truth will reveal itself eventually.

This happened this summer with two films. Cars 2, which was better than the original, was spoken down to because people expect more from Pixar while Transformers 3 was, for some, given a free pass because they weren't expecting it to be better than the awful second film.

Of course, expectations will never be able to be totally managed. Films accumulate history and reputations almost instantly, that will grow and change over time. Lesser critics maybe don't trust their literary voice enough to to say the same thing as everyone else but in a compelling and personal way and the truth of great cinema almost never reveals itself immediately. It requires quite time to sit and reflect and to understand exactly what a movie has done and how that has effected you, because, as I've argued many times before, there is a strong difference between what you like and what is good (the best criticism existing between the two and tying them together). 

That is, after all, why we read criticism in the first place. We want to know how a movie effected it's viewer in an intelligent and/or emotional way, not how it fell in line in relation to their expectations. I expect more from critics.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

The third Transformers film Dark of the Moon has so much (too much really) spectacular action that it’s kind of a shame it got stuck with such a bad action movie. In Transformers 3 you will be treated to just about every kind of chase, stunt, explosion, shoot out, special effect, in the book plus the whole book and the kitchen sink as well. If that’s what you’re looking for, good for you. Look no further. Some people consider that getting their money’s worth and although the Transformers films have been a lot of things to a lot of people, boring they have not been. If however you want, oh I don’t know, say, filmmaking, storytelling, characters, drama, insight, depth, logic, common sense, continuity, or any other such endangered species to the Hollywood summer film landscape, well look elsewhere.


“But Hey!” some will scream. “How can you expect anything more from a Transformers movie when you know exactly what you’re getting before you even get it?” I don’t, but how, I retort, can you be satisfied with so much less? The Transformers films, I have realized, under the both flawed and brilliant reign of director Michael Bay, are not films at all but extended music videos in which there is only the outline of story, character, drama etc., and instead of music the quick, jagged images are instead made up of flashes of sound and colour. This is the cinema of banging and blowing up as enormous computer generated effects crash headfirst at high speed into other enormous computer generated effects in an orgasm of colour and noise. Transformers 3 is, if nothing else, certainly the loudest movie I have ever bared witness to.

In my last paragraph there I hinted at how Transformers could be so much more, but then again, I’m not sure, after all this, that it actually can be. Of the last film, the thoroughly unbearable Revenge of the Fallen, I complained of the function of the human characters who were essentially real faces that popped up amid the wall-to-wall animation and served no purpose other than to shout inane dialogue, run away from things exploding and ceaselessly fire unlimited rounds of ammunition, achieving upwards of nothing. Sometimes, I said, in particularly ambitious moments, they were allowed to do all three at once.

In this film, which is, for whatever it’s worth at a base level, infinitely better than that last one, I realized that it’s actually the Transformers themselves that are the problem. Sure the humans are still about as useful as a tuna flavoured lollipop, but it’s the Transformers that really blow the load this time.

To recap before I finish that thought: Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) is now living with his new girlfriend Carly (Victoria Secret model Rosie Huntington-Whitely). This is one hell of a broad. Not only is she the most understanding girlfriend in all of movies, believing Sam and his crazed stories of saving the world, but she also manages to not even break a heel while in the heat of combat as the warring Transformers lay waste to Chicago. That’s a keeper.

Anyway, The Transformers are now used to help the American’s fight their own conflicts until they discover a piece of hidden Intel which suggests that, when the U.S. finally landed on the moon all those years ago they discovered a crashed Autobot ship (those are the good guys by the way) that also housed the lifeless remains of Sentinel Prime, the former Autobot leader. Optimus, learning of this, goes to get Sentinel and resurrect him before the bad Decepticons find him and…I don’t know. Something about pillars that could destroy the earth.

This all leads up to a monster of a third act which is straight, unending wall-to-wall combat as the Autobots and Decepticons wage war against each other in Chicago, leaving the city in ruins. Of course, this being a PG-13 enterprise, no civilian is ever seen to be harmed by the warring robots despite the fact that Transformers have to be one of, if not the leading cause of death in the United States.

Nevertheless, into the fold drops St. Lennox (Josh Duhamel) and his men who jump out of air crafts above Chicago and sail down like flying squirrels into the city because he apparently didn’t get the hint after the last two Transformer battles that machine gun fire doesn’t contribute anything to a giant space robot war except noise pollution.

Not even mentioning that the film also, for reasons above and beyond what my mind allows me to comprehend, features John Malkovich, Frances McDormand and Patrick Dempsey, it’s time to get back to the problem of the Transformers.

If Bay were to allow a genuine human emotion to seep into the movie over the course of the film’s mind battering two and a half hours, and maybe if he’d lay off the pyrotechnics a little than maybe, just maybe there would be something here. But because the film revolves around a nonsense plot involving robots who have no back story, no empathy, no characteristics and nothing that defines their existence, it is virtually impossible to care about a single one of them. They are thus, when broken down, essentially made to crash into each other, pound each other to spare parts, blow one another up and, ultimately to have faces to be put on t-shirts and be made into action figures and so on.

All of this, as all bad movies tend to, left my mind to wander to this: What is the origin of Transformers? How did they come to be on that distant planet of Cybertron? Because they are machines that leads one to believe that they would have had to be assembled, which explains why none of them are females, but what was the force that brought the first Transformer to assembly? It couldn’t have been human as, until they arrived on Earth no knowledge of Cybertron existed. But it would have had to have been something. And how, if not human, did this mysterious force know to model them after American vehicles?

Of course, the movie doesn’t have any answers to these questions, but I didn’t expect it to. What it does have is a lot of bang-pow-boom-blow-up-fall-down-shoot-shoot-run-jump-crash kind of action. It’s masterfully done but after a certain point it all blends together into one big void of nothingness. I know, I know, why should I expect anything more? Apparently not a single fan of these films does.

Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris opens with Woody Allen’s traditional jazz score atop many static shots of Paris. We see the famous landmarks like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre, it is morning, it is sunny, it rains, it is night, the streets are bare and the streets are bustling with life as people populate the city. They are the most serious and solemn shots in the film as they evoke the realization that although these people live now, they will all eventually fade away. The realization from this is that, as they pass and a new population comes and goes, Paris will always live, rich in it’s history, always breathing and growing. Life is short but Paris is eternal.

It’s that quality which maybe most attracts young and middle aged men to Paris in order to ditch everything, take up residence there and discover themselves through the creation of great art and literature. It’s about making oneself a peasant for one last crack at attempting something meaningful. Art may be made from suffering but it is also made from freedom. Henry Miller described it best in his opening of The Tropic of Cancer as he haunts the streets of Paris: “I have no money, to resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.”

Midnight in Paris is thus three love letters rolled into one. It is a love letter to Paris, a love letter to writing and a love letter to the past. It’s a tale of whimsy without being too whimsical. It’s Allen’s most lovely film in years.

The film revolves around Gil (Owen Wilson playing the Woody Allen surrogate), a Hollywood script writer who has escaped to Paris with his fiance Inez (Rachel McAdams) in the hopes of leaving behind the creation of meaningless entertainment and crossing over into grand literature through the writing of his novel. Gil is in love with the idea of Paris, thinks it is even more beautiful in the rain and longs for the glory days of the 20s when the city was alive with great art, literature, music, what have you.

His novel, not appreciated by Inez or anyone else he describes it to, is about a man who runs his own nostalgia shop, selling meaningful items from the golden age of entertainment which have now, in the present, been reduced to no more than worthless camp articles.

There he meets Inez’s old friend Paul (Michael Sheen). Paul represents one of Allen’s favourite targets: a pedantic pseudo-intellectual who belivies himself to know everything about art and culture to the point where he will argue his point over that of the tour guide. One night, not wanting to go dancing and having sampled too much wine, Gil goes for a walk by himself around Paris. He rests on a stoop and as the clock strikes twelve a vintage car pulls around and tells him to get in.

He is escorted to a party where he meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Yes, that Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They explain to him that some people have come together to throw a party for Jean Cocteau. And is that Cole Porter on the piano? Gil thinks someone is pulling his leg until the Fitzgerald’s, finding out that Gil is a writer, invite him to meet Ernest Hemmingway, who doesn’t want to read his book but will indeed take it to Gertrude Stein for a once over. Gil, overjoyed, goes to retrieve the manuscript but finds that, upon leaving, the glorious 20s party has morphed back into a standard dry cleaners.

And so every night Gil finds an excuse to sneak away so that, when the clock strikes midnight, he will be picked up and taken away to the 1920s. While there he meets Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray and Picasso who is currently dating Adriana (Marian Cotillard), a French beauty who quickly becomes the star in Gil’s eye. She is initially taken by passages of his novel and dreams of getting out of the dreary 20s and escaping back further into the past herself. She dreams of escaping to a golden era where everything was better

What this amounts to is one of Woody Allen's more quiet, tender and lovely films. In the same vein as Sweet & Lowdown, Midnight in Paris remembers fondly a time in the past when great art and literature were created by a commune of great minds coming together. It then ultimately comes to the tender realization that to pine for the past is not enough. One must pay homage to it in order to keep it alive while still finding beauty and poetry in the present to keep the tradition moving forward.