I haven’t watched all of Woody Allen movies but from those which I have seen before I can say that the main character in his scripts stands out in the crowd and in this movie we have Gil, a writer who is surrounded by a group of people that are completely unlike him.
At first glance it puts the idea of him as a gold digger who wants to marry a wealthy girl but as the movie continues you start to back down because you see him wearing inexpensive clothing and is reluctant to stick to the lavish lifestyle of her fiancé’s family. He’s also against marketing gimmicks of Hollywood and screenwriting. It is obvious that he was trying to profess his passion about nostalgia. You may think of him as his dead idol Fitzgerald who was unknown to the general public in his lifetime. For him living in the past with his admired authors is as much a desire as being in Paris in the present time. In the scene with the ingenu street vendor, we see these feelings being made plain. Gil suffers from not having an abettor for this affair. He tries to confide in her fiance the night after he discovered the magical spot for the Parisian Doc-Brown-time-machine. Gil also shows a little volatility in his character which I believe springs from the apathy that is embedded in his personality, but after his spectacle midnights, it is replaced by defiance with that prolific professor, art-critics, wine taster — Paul- which they happened to run into at a restaurant and Gil was propelled to spend some evenings with him and his democratic woman exploring Paris in a way he does not like. That scene in the art gallery was the emergence of the new indulgent Paris-vibes-riding Gil emancipating from all the stifling touches of sarcasm about his writing process. After this scene, we can see that Gil is no longer flabbergasted by all the 1920’s night-outs in Paris and starts enjoying it. The genie is out of the bottle now. As of this moment, the rift within his romantic life starts deepening that ends with him calling off the wedding while he’s growing feelings for Adriana a girl from his non-hallucinatory dreams. He has embarked on living in a different world of the 1920s, waiting all day long for the clock to strike midnight and get into the car. His perpetuated pang of nostalgia gets eased only after realizing how much Adriana wants to similarly live in Paris of the 18th century in which Edgar Degas and Paul Gauguin had found that empty and wanted to be living in the Renaissance era. The golden age for every generation is different from the time they have to live out. Watching this movie has always evoked a burning desire in me not for living in the past, but for living the present adoringly, thereafter a century from now some young people from the future would be dreaming of living our oblivion golden age.
