The other day, when I should have been concentrating on f...

The other day, when I should have been concentrating on finding somewhere to live other than a tent, I was instead indulging my guilty pleasure – watching Woody Allen’s  Midnight In Paris   for, oh, perhaps the fiftieth time.  For those who have never had that particular pleasure, the film concerns a writer trapped in an unhappy engagement to a highly materialistic girl, who despises his attempts at writing a novel, and his desire to move to Paris and walk in the rain, and – with the help of her appalling parents – nags him to return to lucrative screenwriting and a house in Malibu.

One night – making the excuse that walking helps his creativity – he leaves the Paris hotel where they are staying, and strolls along the banks of the Seine, where, on the stroke of midnight a vintage car appears, full of excitable people, who take him to a party. Here he meets his heroes – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway – in fact, all the great and the (not so) good of the Lost Generation of writers and artists who lived in Paris between the wars.  He realises that the steps he had been sitting on, lost in every sense of the word, were a portal to the age he wishes he had been born in, when inspiration could be found in the things he loves: including walking in the rain in Paris.

He becomes besotted with a French girl, lover of Pablo Picasso, but their dreams take them in separate ways because she, too, has a Golden Age: it just happens to be the turn of the 20th century.

Eventually, he realises that he can make his dreams reality while remaining in the 21st century, and finds a Parisian girl who also enjoys walking in the rain and sees nothing odd about wanting to complete a novel: which is fine, because the obnoxious fiancee has been indulging in a little extra curricular activity with an equally obnoxious ‘friend’.

Happy endings all round.



The reason this film resonates with me is that I, too, share that adoration of the era of the lost generation – a sense of a flowering of bold experimentation and creativity, the trying on of new lives for size, an appreciation of artistic expression. Show me a quote from one of my Gods (or Goddesses) of that era of damaged decadence, before we became more coldly cynical, and I melt.

I even named my dog Hemingway.

Most of them ended up dead, or mad, of course – and it’s not fashionable to suffer for art, any more.  It doesn’t pay the bills…and in any case, most of them had private means, however small, to support a vicarious, brittle life-style.  But it’s irresistible to me  to step into that mindset just once in a while, to taste that wine, and see those things, and think those thoughts. 

Unforgettable and marvellous, their lives of drama, passion, and the nitty-gritty of trying to sell their work still resonate despite the absence of a time-travelling portal (at least, from this tent.)

The past is truly another country – but it’s nice to visit.