By Gary Topping–
My wife and I are both over seventy, so we are expected to self-quarantine while the corona virus is going around. At first it seemed a bit of an inconvenience: with churches locked up, we sat here last Saturday night unable to go to Mass, and simply stared at each other in our disorientation. PBS, which is pretty much the only TV network we ever watch, was in their second week (!) of their semi-annual Pledge Week and were only serving up the likes of Suze Orman (don’t get me started!), so we were on our own.
Fortunately, this quarantine comes in the middle of the season of Lent, when we are already seeking ways to pare our lives of non-essentials, and we realized that we already have at hand many ways of doing that, even in the absence of formal assistance from the church. In fact, we’re pretty self-sufficient: right under our roof we have lots of good food, good drink, good books, good movies and good music. So we’ve been reading and watching and listening to all kinds of things that we hope will deepen our spiritual lives and, in fact, our humanity. All without leaving the house.
Last weekend we re-watched—for the umpteenth time—one of our favorite movies, Woody Allen’s 2011 Midnight in Paris. At its most fundamental level, the movie is a paean of praise to the city of Paris. We get this right at the outset, in a wordless 3 ½ minute prologue where the camera pans over various street scenes accompanied by the unmistakable soprano saxophone of the great New Orleans musician Sidney Bechet, whose music was popular in the 1920s.
The plot proper concerns an aspiring novelist, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a Hollywood hack writer who wants to move on to something serious. He has come to Paris to prepare for his wedding, but it is obvious from the outset that his fiancé, played by Rachel McAdams, is completely inappropriate and that the marriage will be a disaster. Wandering the streets one night, he discovers a way to time-travel back to the salon of Leo and Gertrude Stein in the 1920s, where he meets all the famous characters who hung out there: Hemingway, the Fitzgeralds, Cole Porter, Pablo Picasso and others. He strikes up an infatuation with a charmer named Adriana (Marion Cotillard) who is just exiting an affair with Picasso.
The main theme of the movie is the question of whether there is such a thing as a historical Golden Age (a proposition I have previously discussed on this blog). Pender sees the 1920s as just such a time, but Adriana takes him on a further time-travel back to La Belle Epoque of the Gay Nineties, which is where she wants to settle. Pender realizes that neither one of these relationships—with Adriana or his fiancée—is going to work out and he abandons both, as well as his fantasy that there is such a thing as a Golden Age. In the end, he takes up with Gabrielle (Lea Seydoux) , a young proprietor of a second-hand store, who shares his love for Cole Porter’s music and for walking the Paris streets in the rain, but who seems to realize, as he has come to, that one has to live in one’s own time, even while appreciating the cultural achievements of the past.
Midnight in Paris succeeds splendidly as a tribute to a great city, a feat Allen tried to replicate unsuccessfully (in my opinion) the following year in To Rome With Love. But at a deeper level it is a reminder that history has no rewind button (nor a fast forward, as many futuristic stories propose), and that instead we need to devote ourselves with as much dedication as we can to making our lives count in our present circumstances.
It’s not a bad Lenten message.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
