DVD of the Week: “Midnight in Paris”

Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” which I discuss in this video, is one of the nine nominees for the Oscar for Best Picture (Allen is also among the five nominees for both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay), and it deserves such consideration. Running through its breezy, confectionary, and even anachronistically stereotypical depictions of a youngish American screenwriter in Paris, his fiancée and her family and friends, and the figures of his fantasies who seem to come alive for him, are rueful and redemptive reflections that seem enriched with a lifetime of experience. I wrote about these ideas when the film was released, last May; seeing the movie again now, I’m struck by the power that Paris—indeed, that urban life—holds over Allen’s imagination. In New York, the city he knows best, he’s an urban folklorist, recovering and transmitting the habits and mores of his own milieu from his own perspective. In Paris, he’s essentially a tourist, and doesn’t bring personal or family history into play—instead, he turns to history. His view of Paris as a great living museum is no mere figment of his imagination but an actual conjuring of the city’s cultural past. All cities have one, and that of Paris, of course, has a particular prominence in American artistic life. Wittily but, as ever, moralistically, Allen unfolds the menace in all its delights. It’s a radical view of a moderate approach, a moderate depiction of radical steps (the word “radical” derives from the word for “root,” and here it really is a question of roots, and of self-uprooting).