Paris Journal VI: Raiders of the Lost Generation

Paris was once populated by a Lost Generation of expatriate Americans known for their talent, wit and sometimes genius. Woody Allen humorously addressed this era of the 20’s in Midnight in Paris. Today that Lost Generation has multiplied and their great great great grandchildren—in other words, Americans, are everywhere. Having propagated almost biblically, the descendants of the Lost Generation have become like a plague of locusts. You can’t go anywhere in Paris without seeing Americans and just when you think you’ve located a bona fide Frenchman, who talks the talk and walks the walk, even he or she can turn out to be an American dressed up as Frenchmen. You learn not be fooled by Francophiles in berets, who can rattle off esoteric Metro stops like Michel-Ange- Molitor and have no trouble cherching for the rue du Cherche-Midi. Though the onslaught of Americans is welcomed for the economic bounty they represent, they’re looked at suspiciously and even disdainfully by many Parisians precisely because even those with affectations fundamentally lack the Gallic charm, the holy grail that many Americans come to Paris for in the first place. When a Frenchman comes to New York, he or she is generally treated like royally due to the way they embody what is deemed to be a superior culture. But the achievements of the Lost Generation of Hemingways and Fitzageralds have long been forgotten and it’s the image of the ugly American with his or her profound lack of savoir faire—the tourist loaded down with guide books, time sensitive tickets to the latest blockbuster art show at the Grand Palais and naturally their Zagat’s--that’s prevailed. In a sense it’s unfair. Why should enthusiastic Americans be penalized while the French are rewarded for being what they are?

Midnight in Paris

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris is a monstrosity, proof that even a comic genius who also happens to be the Jane Austen of his age (to the extent that he is a great documenter of manners and morals) can still miss the mark. If we were to see the film with no knowledge of Allen’s oeuvre, we might summarily dismiss it as the work of an inferior artist. Could the meta-view of Paris that Allen presents be intentionally ugly and factitious in order to render a world someone might want to escape from? Gil (Owen Wilson) posits escape as a kind of brass ring when he says “the present is a little unsatisfying because life is a little unsatisfying.” He later quotes Faulkner’s “the past is not dead; it’s not even past.” But the intention of Allen's directorial disquisition is never clear. Parenthetically, Wilson is as unsuccessful in playing the Woody-Allen-type doofus as Allen is in portraying Paris. It is unlikely that F. Scott, Zelda, Ernest, Salvador, Gertrude or any of the Lost Generation would have been terribly pleasant company, despite their bouts of genius, but the film’s heavy-handed plot line, which transports our protagonist back in time, from the dreary materialism of the present to the Paris of the ‘20s and eventually La Belle Epoque, where he interrupts Toulouse-Lautrec while he’s drawing the Folies and makes the acquaintance of Degas and Gauguin, presents us with a series of gargoyles that would be booed off of a high-school stage. The movie starts with a Paris montage that aspires to Hemingway’s moveable feast, but instead of creative sumptuousness, it has the gastronomic and esthetic appeal of Leonard's, the garish Great Neck bar mitzvah parlor. It's a sequence that would have made Cartier-Bresson vomit.