Nostalgia for the Lost Generation

So there are two things you should know.

Number one: if you are ever in Bar Harbor and looking for an evening’s entertainment, you

enjoying the couches and TV tables inside reel pizza (yes, that is inside a movie theatre!)

should check out reel pizza.  Imagine a movie theatre.  Imagine a movie theatre with couches.  Imagine a movie theatre with couches that serves fresh homemade pizza and locally brewed beers.  Imagine all that with old school aluminum TV tables and an intermission about halfway through the movie.

This place is too intensely cool for words.  They only play two movies at any given time and they do tend to fill up for shows, so make sure you get there super early and be prepared to see something quasi-indie.  Totally worth the (might I add cheap) ticket price.

Number two: If you have yet to see Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, correct this egregious oversight as expediently as possible.  Especially if you have any interest in literature, painting, Paris, or the 1920s.

 

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

Basic plot synopsis: Hollywood screen-writer Gil comes to Paris with his fiancé Inez in hopes of finishing his book while they are there.  He is also nostalgically stuck in 1920s Paris and romantically longs to wander the streets in the rain and write in a one-room apartment in the Latin Quarter.  WASP Inez is having none of that and instead strikes up an affair with her old flame.  Gil, intent to enjoy Paris on his own terms, discovers that if he waits on a certain street corner, at midnight a cab will appear and he can enter that cab to be transported to 1920s Paris where he hangs with such illustrious influences as Gertrude Stein, Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Salvador Dali.

Of course, I enjoyed the film, but couldn’t help but notice one blaring detail which fails to surface over its course.

When, exactly, does Gil go back to and are his companions during the time travel segments of the movie feasible?

The entire film is based upon a nostalgia for “the twenties”.  Several times, Gil explains his time travel adventures as going back to “the twenties”.  This occurred enough times in the film’s sequence that it seemed out of place.  Wouldn’t someone so enthralled with Paris’ history have some notion, based upon the surrounding historical events as well as the company he kept, of when he was?

My snooping around has revealed several things.  First and foremost, a disclaimer: I am not an art historian or a Picasso enthusiast.  My information on Picasso is as limited as my sources, and there is simply so much to sift through.  I have done my best to compile reliable sources in a limited amount of time, but if any of you know more than I do about the topic do feel free to correct me.

During the time of Gil’s visits, both Hemmingway and Fitzgerald had published at least once before.  Hemmingway’s first work was The Sun Also Rises published in 1926, and Fitzgerald’s first novel was This Side of Paradise in 1920.  Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925, and in the subsequent years he and his wife Zelda (married in 1920) made several trips to Paris and became close with the expatriate community there (including Hemingway whom the Fitzgeralds met in 1925 in Paris).

So far, so good.  All evidence points to a time period between 1925 and 1930.

Hemingway was close with Gertrude Stein and he did meet Picasso at Stein’s salon (the bastion of modernism in Paris).  Picasso never had a mistress named Adriana (his mistress in Allen’s film), though the painter was famous for his affairs.  As far as I can tell, the actual woman who most resembles the Adriana figure is Marie-Therese Walter, Picasso’s mistress during the time in which he was married to Olga Khoklova.  Picasso married Khoklova in 1918 and had a child with her in 1921.  After the child was born, their relationship deteriorated and Picasso met Walter in 1927 in Paris.

 

A Picasso Nu Couch, this one was painted in 1942

The Picasso painting shown in the movie, allegedly of Adriana, is not actually a Picasso.  It does, however, closely resemble any one of his nu couché paintings (nude on a couch).  It is clearly done in the mid-to-end of his career since Picasso didn’t adopt the cubist style until 1910.

Alright, so if we’re assuming that Adriana is Walter, then the film couldn’t have taken place until at least 1927.

Incidentally, in January 1927, Hemingway divorces his first wife Hadley.  He married Pauline Pfeiffer in the May of that same year.  Hemingway had been having an affair with Pfeiffer, though Hadley and Hemingway separated in Paris (presumably where Pfeifer was not).  Allen’s Hemingway displays a raucous amount of womanizing behavior, perhaps to be expected of a man recently separated from his wife. Hemingway’s women are never mentioned in the film, though at one point he runs off to Africa with Adriana.

The trip to Africa did, in fact, happen… but not until 1952.  During the trip, he was almost killed in a plane crash and this incident left Hemingway in pain or poor health for the rest of his life.

So despite a few little irregularities, we can fairly firmly place Gil’s time travel to the Spring of  1927.  Incidentally, at that juncture Hemingway had yet to pen A Farewell to Arms (though most of his lines in the movie seem as though they come directly out of this book).  Mark Twain, also mentioned in the film, had already published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) as well as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1876) so it is a slight wonder that, when Gil mentions these publications, he receives only blank stares.  This year was almost exactly mid-career for Fitzgerald, though he had already published both his most lucrative work (This Side of Paradise) and his most lasting (The Great Gatsby).

So there you have it.  And now that that niggling detail won’t be bothering you the entire movie, even more reason to go see it.

…you may want to brush up on your lost generation trivia before you go.  Understanding the in jokes isn’t pivotal to enjoying the experience, but it most certainly helps.