Midnight in Paris

The story

Full story — spoilers ahead.

Gil Pender is a Hollywood screenwriter who wants to be a novelist and is currently on holiday with a fiancée who does not want that version of him. Inez likes restaurants, status, and the idea of Gil as a success she can introduce. Gil likes rain, bookshops, and the fantasy that Paris in the 1920s would have understood him. Their friends Paul and Carol are the kind of couple who correct museum plaques for sport. The trip is already a quiet argument about what a life is for.

One night Gil gets lost on a walk. A vintage car stops at midnight. The people inside invite him in as if he were expected. He is delivered to a party where Cole Porter is at the piano and Zelda Fitzgerald is already a little too bright. Scott introduces himself. Later Hemingway offers to show a manuscript to Gertrude Stein. Gil thinks he is drunk. Then it happens again the next night, and the night after that.

The past is not a museum. It is a living room that will have him. He meets Adriana, Picasso’s lover and a woman who is restless in her own era the way Gil is restless in his. She wants the 1890s the way he wants the 1920s. That is the joke the movie is building toward, though Gil does not hear it yet. He starts skipping Inez. He starts believing he has found the door that ordinary people miss.

Inez is not a cartoon villain, even when the film is unkind to her. She wants a version of Gil that matches the life they already have. She also may be having an affair with Paul. Gil cannot decide which betrayal hurts more: the possible romance or the certainty that she will never walk into a midnight car with him.

He shows Stein his novel. He talks boxing with Hemingway. He gets advice from Dalí and a pedantic lecture from a time-traveling version of the same intellectual disease he already knows. The more perfect the past becomes, the more he notices that the people living in it are homesick for a further past. Adriana asks him to stay in the Belle Époque. He finally understands the trap. Every golden age is someone else’s disappointing present.

He lets the car go. He breaks the engagement because pretending would be a different kind of time travel. On a later night it rains, which is what he said he wanted, and he meets Gabrielle, an antique dealer who likes the same streets in the actual hour they are standing in.

Midnight in Paris is a comedy about nostalgia that refuses to sneer at the people who feel it. Gil is foolish and sincere. The past is gorgeous and unavailable. The ending is not that 1920s Paris was fake. It is that the only Paris you can love without stealing someone else’s life is the one that is wet, expensive, and happening now.