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The Necessity of Nostalgia: Michel Hazanavicius' “The Artist” and Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris”

The 84th Academy Awards ceremony saw the triumph of two motion pictures, The Artist and Midnight in Paris, which have the power to transport the viewer to a (seemingly) innocent, less distracting time. Both films celebrate the golden twenties, reminding us that there was in fact a time period when men and women of a certain class were meticulously dressed, and speech was a carefully cultivated art form. The modern audience connects with this, as is evident from the accolades both films have been receiving. It may very well be possible that inside every one of us (above the age of thirty or thirty-five), there beats a heart that secretly longs for the irretrievable past which turns a little rosier with every passing year. Nostalgia keeps our imagination alive and makes present-day reality bearable.

The Artist is an unabashed homage to the short-lived silent movie era, whose luminaries included names such as Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin. With the arrival of “talking pictures” in 1927, silent movies rapidly lost their appeal, and are mostly remembered today for their quirkiness and high camp factor. The Artist changed all that by presenting us with a “modernised” version. Director Hazanavicius has remained largely faithful to the “silent movie blueprint” (live orchestral music, comical intertitles, facial acting), but he also offers us a little something extra to let us know that we are only watching the film "from the outside.” This is most obvious in those surprising scenes where sound is suddenly allowed to intrude, and when the film arrives at its finale and the audience is once again safely restored to the world of sound (an ingenious ploy that causes the viewer to regret not being able to remain longer in the soundless world). The film can only elicit this sort of reaction from us because we know that the 21st-century world is one of chaos, information overload, vulgar speech, ditto public behaviour, and stone-cold individualism. For a hundred minutes, The Artist manages to convince us that the world almost a hundred years ago was a decidedly more humane and refined place. 1920’s reality might have been a whole different kettle of fish (need I remind anyone of the aftermath of the First World War?), but at least in The Artist we get the feeling that it was a better time and place to be.

Woody Allen also does what he does best in Midnight in Paris: waxing nostalgic. The master comedian has done it multiple times before, with perhaps 1987’s Radio Days being the most memorable trip down memory lane. Midnight in Paris, unlike the autobiographical Radio Days, is channelled through a fictitious character who longs to detach himself from the confusions of modern-day Paris. An outrageous stroke of luck transports him to 1920’s Paris, where he consorts with larger-than-life expatriate literary/artistic figures such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, Djuna Barnes and more. Allen’s protagonist finds himself caught in a time-warp, swept off his feet by the life-affirming energy of 1920’s Paris, reluctant to return to the present where an unsympathetic fiancée is awaiting him. Allen’s depiction of 1920’s Paris is deliciously romantic and inspirational; in the director’s mind, it was a place where ambitious intellectuals gathered to swap ideas and embrace one another’s artistic output in perfect harmony. (I shall write more on this subject once I am done reading Hemingway’s Parisian memoir A Moveable Feast.) Reality, again, might have been very different, but what truly matters is Allen has created a literate Paris to which those of us who tire of modern-day anti-intellectualism can escape.

A life without nostalgia cannot be worth living, because it lacks imagination and is only preoccupied with the present and the pragmatic. It is incapable of reflection and introspection. For a life to be rich with imagery and meaning, it needs to be able to look back and review the past – in moderation, naturally.
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