Nostalgia in Midnight in Paris

“Nostalgia is denial. Denial of the painful present. The name for this denial is Golden Age thinking - the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in - its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.”

Every man has its own country and France JFK

You are in love with a fantasy

Moveable Feast - Hemingway

 I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving, or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks death squarely in the face like some rhino hunters I know, or Belmonte, who's truly brave.

İts my favourite era. Everything was so

                  beautiful then.

Degas and I were just talking about

                  how - this generation has lost its imagination.

The present is always

                    going to seem unsatisfying because

                    life itself is unsatisfying -

He finds it hard to believe the

               protagonist doesn't see his fiancee

               is having an affair that's going on

               right before his eyes.

                         GIL

               with -

                         STEIN

               The other character - the pedantic

               one -

                         GIL

               It's called denial.

bells

“Paris is the most beautiful in the rain”,

But, hearing her talk about going back to the 1890s, eventually makes him realize the relevance of staying in the present century and this sudden occurrence marks every next step that he takes in the film moving us to an impeccable ending.

For some of us, the past has a special allure.

"It was Gil's journey through the past that helped him identify what was missing in his present and that gave him the courage to take steps to correct it,"

fantasy is generally thought of as a defense mechanism that allows someone to lose themselves and block out the bad

This is why Rachel McAdams's character, Inez, tells Owen Wilson's character, Gil, that he is "in love with a fantasy"--that the Paris that charms him so is a Paris that does not objectively exist; it exists only in the phenomenology of his own perception, a perception marred and made unreliable by his own escapist need to withdraw from the present in order to take shelter in a glorified, utopian past. 

his sentiment that he was "born too late,

By glancing backward rather than forward, Gil's nostalgic gaze avoids the inevitable encounter with his own mortality and safely burrows himself in the calm reassurance of a glorious, if fictionalized, past. 

"drop dead gorgeous" GİL

                                NOSTALGIA IN MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

        Woody Allen's movie "Midnight in Paris"  takes us to a heartwarming and a peaceful trip to Paris. In the beginning of the movie Allen shows a five minutes of visual feast of  Paris' streets and famous places in panoramic view accompanied by a traditional French music as if he is portraying Paris as a character.  These lovely views instantly captures the viewer and sparks a strong desire to wander around the Paris. The protagonist Gil Pender does not hide his love for the city as he states "drop-dead gorgeous" in the opening scenes. Gil is struggling to finish a novel which is about a man who works in a nostalgia shop. The movie depicts us  a variety of nostalgic motifs throughout the movie and Gil is endowed with an unending desire for nostalgia.