Nostalgia In Midnight In Paris

Most of us sometimes evoke nostalgic feelings from our past. When people are exhausted to their present, they often imagine going back to not only the distant past but also the recent time. For instance, college seniors who have about one year for graduating would miss the time when they just entered a university. Also, some office workers would look back on the past longing for their old school days. Likewise, many people often pine for the past, the time they think that they would feel happier than the present. Even so, are we going to be satisfied with our lives if we go back into the time when we hope to live and stay? The movie Midnight in Paris answers the question with this quote from the film. “If you stay here, though, and this becomes

It’s a little unsatisfying because life’s a little unsatisfying.” Through this lines from the film, the movie suggests that even if people get back to the period that they idealize all the time, soon they will be unsatisfied with their own present again as the past becomes their present. Nostalgia for the past, however, is not simply described in a negative way in the movie Midnight in Paris. Instead, in this movie, a sense of nostalgia for the past is interpreted as the driving force to lead people to make a new leap in their present. With the description of the process how Gil Pender, who is the protagonist of the movie, becomes realized the importance of living in the present sincerely through his time travel, the movie effectively delivers the significance of being faithful in the present while keeping the nostalgic feeling from the past with several literary elements including the plot, characters and settings of the

The plot of the film primarily follows the basic plot structure of fiction – exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution - depending on the two primary conflicts that revolve around the lead character Gil. From the beginning part of the movie, for the exposition of the plot, Gil’s dissatisfaction of his present life as a famous movie writer in Hollywood and his nostalgic feeling of Paris in the 1920s are clearly revealed. In the first scene of the film, while praising the beauty of the city Paris, Gil says that “If I had stayed here and written novels and not gotten into grinding out movie scripts, I would drop the house in Beverly Hills, the pools, everything in a second.” Gil’s quote in the first scene of the movie effectively shows his unhappy attitude to his present life as a movie writer. While being unsatisfied with his present life, he is carried backward to Paris in the 1920s, the time Gil always dreamed of as his golden age, by chance. With his mystical time travel, the rising action of the plot begins in earnest in the movie. When he travels back to the past for the first time, he is so confused at first, but as soon as he meets the legendary writers and artists in 1920s such as Hemingway and Picasso whom he