Midnight In Paris is a romantic comedy about Gil, a young man who travels back in time to the past at midnight, where he grows up and struggles between his dreams, reality, and love. Director Woody Allen uses midnight as a visual representation of the fundamental differences between men and women, making this film about a man’s fantasy a unique work that resonates with both sexes.

His variation on midnight, ‘Midnight In Paris’

Cinderella disappeared with the sound of the midnight bell. But the fantasy of Gil, the protagonist of Midnight In Paris, begins with the chimes. While most romantic comedies are about the fantasies of the female protagonist, this movie is about the male protagonist. But aside from this, the movie strictly follows the conventions of the romantic comedy genre in terms of format and story. In short, Midnight In Paris is a “twist” on the romantic comedy genre that switches the roles of men and women and adds a touch of fantasy.
For example, the gorgeous Parisian scenery at the beginning of the movie makes the audience and the artists in the movie, including the main character Gil, fall in love with it. However, only the female characters in the movie know or want to know how fascinating Paris is. This is a detail that goes against the grain of most movies that portray Paris as a place full of romance for women. Thus, from start to finish, the movie tells the story of the romance of Paris through the eyes of a man.
In fact, Midnight In Paris is not a very special movie, but the director switches the roles of the man and the woman in the usual romantic comedy movie and uses only the time of the day, “midnight,” to create a pretty cool fantasy and romantic comedy hybrid genre movie. I found this interesting, and the gorgeous landscapes and the fantasies of the main character, Gil, about his past were very similar to my own. But why did he send him traveling at midnight? I’m going to talk about the movie along with the different meanings of the time ‘midnight’ in this movie.

A coming-of-age story and midnight

The main staple of the romantic comedy genre is the “conflict” between a man and a woman. In most romantic comedies, this conflict is present throughout the movie and is resolved by the end. This is the conventional characteristic that best describes romantic comedies. The movie “Midnight In Paris” also follows this basic formula of romantic comedy conventions. There is a conflict between the male protagonist, Gil, and the female protagonists, Inez and Adriana, and the movie ends with the resolution of this conflict. However, this movie is a little different from other romantic comedies in that it depicts the characters and their conflicts from a different perspective.
The male protagonist, Gil, is traveling to Paris with his fiancée, Inez. However, the two are at odds throughout the trip. This is because they have different dreams. Gil dreams of a life in Paris, but Inez doesn’t understand him. At first glance, the conflict between the two seems to be a common conflict between men and women that we see in other movies. However, a deeper look reveals that the conflict is between Gil, the protagonist, and his dreams and reality. It’s a coming-of-age story in which Gil is at a crossroads, faced with the choice of continuing his comfortable but unfulfilling life, or creating a new life as a writer, which is not guaranteed, but which he is attracted to.
Coming-of-age stories like this are common in romantic comedies, but what makes this one special is that it’s a coming-of-age story for a grown man, not a woman. If the main character of this movie was Inez instead of Gil, it would have been just like any other romantic comedy movie. The story of a woman struggling to choose between work and love has been done too many times before, but the fact that it’s about an ordinary man struggling to choose between work and love is one of the reasons why both men and women can enjoy this movie. It’s not like most romantic comedies make male audiences uncomfortable by portraying the man as the one who forces the woman to make sacrifices or sways the heroine to get his way. It also means that the traditional portrayal of men in these movies has meant that they’ve been portrayed as closed-minded, grown-ups. (At this point, existing romantic comedies may have been reversely discriminating against men by featuring women as protagonists.) By featuring a man instead of a woman, the film also breaks the conventions of male characters in the romantic comedy genre.
And if it were a woman, there would be no need for the midnight hour. This movie, like a variation, empowers the time of midnight by having a man as the protagonist. A romantic comedy with a woman as the main character has to be beautiful. The man has to be handsome and the woman has to be lovely to look at, so to make them stand out, they’re always placed in beautiful, bright, and colorful spaces. However, if we start with the main characters, Gil is a successful screenwriter, but he’s far from the idealized man that women dream of. He talks about the romance of the rainy Parisian scenery rather than realistic issues such as money or a house. Rather, the man of most women’s dreams is Paul, the fiancé of Inez’s friend. Unlike Gil, he is intelligent, down-to-earth, and capable. It’s no wonder that Inez, who symbolizes the average woman, has an affair with him. When we see this side of Gil, it is more convincing in the movie that he is in a dark place than in a bright space. For a man who dreams of being a writer and denies his current reality, a brightly lit noon is not the place for him. In fact, in the movie, Gil prefers rainy Paris to bright Paris. When it rains, night comes into the daytime of the world. Even at noon, when the sun is at its zenith, the clouds create a midnight-like darkness. And while in the world of noon he is just an incompetent wannabe writer, in the world of midnight he is recognized as a promising writer. Therefore, in this movie about the coming of age of an ordinary man named Gil, midnight seems to mean more than just the time of midnight. It helps him grow by sending everyone else into a different world. At the same time, it suggests a dormant area of potential for growth that we may not even realize exists in ourselves, but is definitely there.

Men, women, and midnight

As mentioned earlier, the conflict between Gil and his fiancée Inez stems from her inability to understand his dreams: she doesn’t approve of his dreams, his desire to become a writer and settle down in Paris. On the other hand, her dream of a glamorous marriage and a fancy honeymoon home is in America, not Paris. Of course, her refusal to recognize his dreams and eventually having an affair with another man doesn’t feel like an unconditional stubbornness or force to move the movie forward. It must have been frustrating for her to see Gil as her husband-to-be.
for her husband-to-be. She is thinking about her ‘future’ with him. This aspect of her is convincing enough. It is Gil, the main character, who seems to be less convincing. He also finds her attitude frustrating. The two fail to understand each other from the beginning to the end of the movie. Inez is not the only person Gil fails to communicate with; Adriana, the woman from his past that he praises so much, also fails to communicate with him. He thinks that Adriana, who lives in the romantic era he longs for, will be able to understand his dreams, but in the end, she shares a different romance with him.
Of course, if you interpret the conflict between Gil, Inez, and Adriana caused by Gil’s attitude as a conflict between them alone, you might find his character unconvincing. However, this is a feminist interpretation of the film that analyzes the men through the eyes of the women, Inez and Adriana. This conflict brings to the surface the fundamental differences that exist between men and women. Fundamentally, men and women exist in a different time and space, and they are incommunicable beings who, no matter how hard they try, will always fail to understand each other’s desires.
This incommunicability between men and women is visually realized by director Woody Allen through the spaces of Paris and America and the times of midnight and day. Let’s focus on time here. If a man’s time is midnight, a woman’s time is noon, when the sun is at its highest point. They share the same place on the clock: 12 o’clock. But despite sharing the same place on the clock, midnight and noon contain a fundamental impossibility: they can’t meet. Women usually do everything during the day. She eats, meets with friends, chats, and shops. If you think about the things that women value, they’re usually flashy things like bags, clothes, and jewelry. But these things don’t mean much in the dark. In the light of day, they show themselves and are valued, but when night falls, they become like other baubles, indistinguishable in the dark, so she turns a blind eye to their disappearance into the darkness as she sleeps.
Unlike these women, for most men, the daytime is boring and uninteresting. Rather, a man’s desires don’t disappear at night, they awaken. While women are fascinated by colorful jewelry, men are fascinated by the glittering neon lights of the night and the headlights of cars. This nighttime splendor is enhanced in the movie by the presence of Parisian artists. These artists have a secret that only Gil and midnight know, a secret that only they know. In this movie, the secret symbolizes the desire of a man represented by the countless Parisian artists. Every object seems more beautiful to us, especially to men, when it holds some kind of secret. The reason why the night street in Midnight In Paris is so beautiful is because it hides a secret: it symbolizes not only the object of men’s desire, but also desire itself.
I think it’s great that the movie doesn’t just use the conflict between the sexes as a device to implement certain cinematic conventions, but instead uses it to illustrate certain fundamental differences between them that are bound to cause conflict. In other romantic comedies, this inability to communicate would have been overcome through the reconciliation of the male and female protagonists, but this old but wise director who has lived long enough to know better acknowledges it through the failure of reconciliation instead of overcoming it. The fact that we can think of the conflict in terms of time also shows how much effort the director put into the scenario of this movie.

Fantasy meets midnight

Another aspect of the movie Midnight In Paris that we can’t leave out is its combination with the fantasy genre. The main character, Gil, travels back in time at midnight and spends a happy time with the artists of his dreams. But why did Gil travel to the past instead of the future, and why did he meet the artists?
Disconnection from reality is one of the most defining characteristics of the fantasy genre. The key word here is “separation. All humans have a fear of separation. If it’s done well, we can move on to the next step, to the present, but if it’s not done well, we’re stuck in the past. To stay is to be left behind. But great works of art, and the artists who create them, are free from the judgment of being left behind. Beautiful things don’t change in place, but rather the future follows the past.
That’s why Gil’s time travel is not just a journey to fulfill his literary fantasy. It’s a meeting between the present and the past, as well as the present and the future, which means that a good past can influence even the most distant future.
In fact, in the movie, Gil was the one who couldn’t move from the present to the future. He is stuck in the present, where the past and present are intermingled, and this is very similar to the image of midnight. Midnight, where he travels, is also the point where the past of yesterday meets the present of today, and the present of today meets the future of tomorrow. In other words, the time of midnight is the protagonist, Gil. As he travels to the past and meets the artists who created classics that are still recognized today, he finds his way back to where he should go, which means that he can only move forward when the past and the future communicate.
This message behind the sweet fantasy romance of Midnight In Paris is one that director Woody Allen has been thinking about for as long as he’s been making movies: past and present, present and future. Perhaps through the character of Gil, Allen is answering his own questions about the direction of his life. In this somewhat flimsy fantasy of a horse-drawn carriage ride, there are answers not only to the romance of the protagonists, but also to the path of Gil, the protagonist, and the path of Woody Allen, the old director, and art in general.

A fairy tale for men, but good for women too

In many ways, the main character, Gil, is very similar to Cinderella, the main character of the fairy tale Cinderella. From the carriage ride to the midnight hour. However, there are some differences between the two: whereas the fairy tale perceived midnight as the end of all fantasy, this movie sees it as both the end and the beginning.
However, the biggest difference between the two that I wanted to talk about with Midnight In Paris, and the strength of the movie, is that it is a fantasy fairy tale for both men and women. Women look at Cinderella and dream of being her, but strangely enough, men who read Cinderella don’t want to be the prince. The same goes for traditional romantic comedy genre movies. They existed as strictly female-oriented fairy tales, with men as an afterthought.
This movie is about a man’s fantasy from a man’s point of view, but it’s not a movie that has only men in mind. As I mentioned earlier, the characters and hidden messages in the movie are relatable to both men and women. At the base of this empathy is the time of midnight. Time affects not only people, but also lifeless things like objects. Men, women, and the world all go through the same time, but at the same time, they also go through the time of midnight!
In the end, I found Midnight In Paris to be a warm and delicious movie that is good for both men and women, with visually beautiful images that are good for the eyes and good for the body throughout the running time.