Wen | columnist of Tachibana Cho Cho Cho Academy
Editor-in-charge| Qiu Jiu
A promising Hollywood screenwriter who is about to marry a rich second-generation girlfriend, takes his future father-in-law and mother-in-law and fiancée to France before marriage, and after the trip, his marriage contract is completely over.
In the process, the fiancée climbed into the bed of another man and told him not to mind, to accept reality calmly, to wear this green hat and to perform the marriage contract calmly. And the male screenwriter who seems to be the victim is actually not a good thing, the trip to France, he constantly stirs up trouble, from the narrator of historical monuments to the pure little sister who sells old records on the street, this is not enough for him to show his superb skills, so he also has to cross to pimp Picasso's little lover... In the end, the two fell apart, and the screenwriter stayed in Paris, and walked romantically in the rain with the pure little sister, which ended the film perfectly.
If you look at "Midnight Paris" from the perspective of the story, maybe it can be called an outrageous ethical drama, about the "scumbag and scumbag woman appearance", but if you look at "Midnight Paris" from an artistic point of view, you will feel that it is too realistic, and every inadvertent scene and discourse can hurt people's hearts, liver and spleen, and the tackiness is too explicit.
Tolstoy said, "In the depths of every man's soul, there is something that only he understands." ”
Everyone looks at Midnight paris with different perspectives, just as the characters in the movie look at Paris from different angles.
In the most romantic city, the most realistic dialogue that takes place is a reflection on love.
The most interesting thing about "Midnight in Paris" is that when the midnight bell rings, the male protagonist can take a car like a time machine to cross to the "golden age" he once longed for, just like a modern person travels back to the prosperous Tang Dynasty and encounters the great poet Li Bai on the streets of Chang'an.
In this romantic story, there are many sharp and unsolvable contradictions, which belong to the director's inner contradictions and many people's inner contradictions.
In the film, The parents of Jill's fiancée have always been skeptical about their marriage.
The most important thing is that his parents feel that his ideas are too jumpy, not like a person who can make money to live a down-to-earth life, and has another doctoral friend who loves to show off his knowledge as a foil, which shows that the male protagonist is not knowledgeable and cultivated enough.
The fiancée and mother were shopping, noticing expensive chairs that didn't do much, and rings studded with diamonds.
The mother talked about questioning the future son-in-law, and the fiancée did not mention his romance or cultivation, but forcefully defended: "Jill, he is very smart and successful..."
A well-known screenwriter, with a certain social status and relative wealth, is a success, and like the diamond-encrusted ring, it is a marriage object worth showing off.
When going out with friends in Paris, the fiancée also tried to encourage Gill to show her talents and compare other people's male companions.
Among the signs, it is difficult to see the spiritual resonance between Jill and his fiancée, more like a combination of door-to-door pairs on the material level.
This is not a dilemma that only high society has, in fact, there are many similar arguments around.
"Marriage is about finding a partner to defend against future risks."
"The love of contemporary society should also pay attention to the door to the door, and two people who are too different cannot be happy."
Although there are also many opposing arguments, attacking this kind of too utilitarian marriage argument, it has to be admitted that whether consciously or unconsciously, more and more people are beginning to look at the conditions to choose a partner.
A few days ago, the Liu Yang and Ah Qin incident, which was boiling over, were together for five years, carrying Ah Qin, Liu Yang did not know how many girls he had stirred, and after rubbing Ah Qin's fame, he had some of his own traffic, and he wanted to get rid of Ah Qin and marry a new family.
Liu Yang had feelings for Ah Qin, but later his feelings faded, he was reluctant to let go, not for anything else, so that Ah Qin still had the value of use.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the too cold relationship between the sexes in reality that male screenwriters yearn for spiritual resonance like dreams.
Stetson said: "No matter how much you are disappointed in the opposite sex, you have no reason to be disappointed in love." For love itself is hope, and it will always be a hope of life. ”
"Midnight in Paris" is about this intense conflict between this strong desire and reality, and this desire is not limited to love, but also lies in the conflict between personal ideals and reality.
Nostalgia for the beauty of the past is despair and submission to the current state of life.
Jill is an excellent Hollywood screenwriter, and this identity is indeed very good in the evaluation criteria of society. But by his own standards, this is not the form of art he wants, and this is not the best era of creation, Jill longs for the "golden age" of 1920 that Hemingway, Stein and other outstanding writers existed.
In that era, it was passionate, writers competed to create, in that era, every art was full of passion and vitality of life, only then can it be called the "Golden Age".
I don't know if Heaven sensed this thought of him, but when the midnight bell in Paris rang, Gill actually returned to the era he longed for.
He talked to the artists he admired and gave his work to Hemingway's exclusive editors for approval.
As Jill travels, the audience seems to follow him back to the good old days when the stars shone, where everyone has their own personality, and they have a high sense of appreciation and an extraordinary sense of responsibility for artistic creation.
Here Gilles even meets a perfect lover, a beautiful girl who is as romantic as he is and wants to escape from reality, Picasso's little lover Adriana, and everything is perfect.
But one night, he had a nightmare that the "Golden Age" had not yet invented the antibiotics he needed to sustain his life.
It turns out that no matter what era you live in, there will be regrets and regrets, and what you yearn for, when it becomes your reality, will not be long before you will also be dissatisfied.
Like white roses and red roses. Take the red rose, and over time the red rose will become a touch of mosquito blood on the wall, the white rose is still "the bright moonlight in front of the bed"; marrying the white rose, the white rose is a rice scum on the clothes, and the red is still a cinnabar mole on the heart.
Midnight in Paris explores the "meaning of existence": the meaning of human existence, the meaning of the existence of artists' works.
Stein's words to Jill revealed the answer: "The artist's mission is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote to the existential nothingness." ”
The literary value of the four masterpieces in the world to this day is beyond doubt, but in the Ming and Qing dynasties, they can only be counted as three religions and nine streams, and even whether the author is those four people is still controversial. The original person who wrote the four masterpieces was originally a last-rate literati whose names were not even worth mentioning, but because of the confrontational spirit in the works that did not want to yield to fate, they touched generations of people, and finally passed these works to this day.
Sun Wukong made a big fuss in the Heavenly Palace and dared to fight the Jade Emperor in Heaven; the good han of Liangshan eliminated the traitors, resisted the imperial court, and roared when the road was uneven; Baoyu, whether true or false, dared to sing unevenly for his daughter, and a generation of bells sounded ding food, not to fall to dust.
Not everyone is suitable to become an artist, but as a person, you should have something to pursue, and you also have the courage to confront it in the face of injustice.
So Gill eventually broke up with everything in the Golden Age, broke off his marriage with his fiancée in reality, returned to his reality, obeyed his heart, and stayed in Paris.
No one knows whether he will regret it in the future, but no matter what choice he makes to regret it, it is also a kind of courage to follow the heart of the moment.