Full disclosure: I love Paris. Not in the ooh Montemartre or gotta get to the Eiffel Tower kind of way, but in the get-lost-and-drink-things-and-meet-crazy-people kind of way, which is how I’ve spent most of my time there.
The first time I went to Paris, I was nineteen and living in Madrid, and went with one of my flatmates. We stayed at a place called Hotel Perfect, which is wasn’t, but it was. Our room was a tiny atelier with one bed on the top floor. It had a miniscule balcony that looked out over the rooftops of the city and a had a shared bathroom down the hall. Although I don’t remember everything about that trip, I certainly remember the first evening we spent there. We went to a little café across the street from our hotel for a glass of wine, and were immediately accosted by two French guys, Michel and Roman. Michel spoke no English, but Roman had spent a summer in Boston. He told me about it approximately fifty times throughout the evening, more and more bitterly as my flatmate and Michel made out with real urgency under every lamp along Rue Rodier and it became clear that fate would not smile down on him in like kind.
Although I was not taken with either of the boys, I was taken with the Paris they showed us: neighborhoods where nary a tourist could be found, and really we shouldn’t have either. We went to a little club in a back alley with stained glass windows and a venue in the basement. An African jazz band played all night – I can remember the electric violin and the layers and layers of drums. The air was inspired and hazy with smoke, and I danced with a man from Gambia whose name I wish I could remember. I drank too much red wine, talked politics with a Spaniard and a German, ate a hot, sweet crepe on the sidewalk at 4am, and watched the sun come up alone from my rooftop perch. It was a perfect first night in Paris.
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| with my husband in 2009 |
I’ve been back since, alone a few times, once with a my wonderful friend Line, whose Syrian family lives just outside the Arc de Triomphe – with her, I smoked hookah and discussed the Arab-American problem in horrific French – and most recently, with my wonderful husband for our last anniversary. Each time, I have found a new neighborhood to explore and have met new people to reveal the city to me. So when I heard about the new film Midnight in Paris, directed by Woody Allen and starring Owen Wilson, I ran to the movie theater. No, really.
I was delighted. For those of you unfamiliar with the premise: Owen Wilson is a struggling writer engaged to a horrible woman and visiting Paris with her terrible parents. He goes for a drunken walk one night to escape their pedantry, and as the clock strikes midnight (yes, this is a fairy tale), a vintage car pulls up and the crowd leans out to invite him along for a ride. In a moment of magic, Wilson (well, his character) is promptly whisked into the world of Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dalí, Buñuel, and a bevy of other heavy-hitters from the Paris of the 1920s. In the charming, mostly-lost way that Owen Wilson navigates most of his films, this film swings back and forth from the exciting Paris of the 20s to the still-enchanting Paris of our own day. Of course, all of the literary and art figures we meet are caricatures of themselves. Dalí can’t stop talking about rhinoceroses, Buñuel mumbles about films, Picasso rants about his lover and argues with Gertrude Stein about the quality of his paintings. Zelda Fitzgerald is drunk and wild; Hemingway can’t stop talking about bravery and killing things with guns. And I loved Gertrude Stein as played by Kathy Bates (with an oh-so-brief appearance of Alice B. Toklas – fitting, non?), presiding over the whole melee with wit and insight, buying a Matisse for 500 francs, guiding the young novelist to find his voice.
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| the louvre at sunset |
The cast truly was an ensemble, and most of them really delivered. I wish that Adrien Brody had seen Dalí’s Lanvin commercials, or perhaps his weird egg-birth home movies; he didn’t seem to have the incredible arrogance and self-amusement that Dalí always embodied. Rachel McAdams, however, was wonderful as an easy-to-hate fiancé uninterested in her husband’s writing or in Paris itself. Her parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) are rich, right-wing Americans who assert early on that they are “certainly not Francophiles” and exhibit all of the discourtesy and blindness I most fear in American tourists. (Except you, dear reader! I am sure that you are a lovely traveler who makes every effort to communicate in the host language, observe cultural norms, and that you never, ever, shout on a subway.) They reminded me of a long-ago ex’s parents in their cultured rudeness: In preparation for a dinner at an haute French restaurant, I put on the best dress that I owned. When I appeared, his mother told me gently, “Oh, that will do just fine. Of course you couldn’t have known that we’d go someplace nice.”
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| stairs, and more stairs |
It’s a silly movie, of course. But I loved it, left the theater with a song on my lips and a great urge to go back to Europe immediately. I’m pretty sure that was the whole point.
