Group A Week 11/18




In this week's class, we talked about Midnight in Paris, and the two opposing theories that Gil is going insane or Gil truly is going back in time.

In the first shot, we see Gil and Inez from afar in the real world, near the ponds that Monet used as inspiration in his paintings. Inez is on the left while Gil is on the right.
When the camera comes close to them, it flips. Gil is now on the left, while Inez is on the right. Gil moves closer to Inez and pulls her in for a kiss. Inez before he kisses her says, "You're in love with a fantasy." Gil replies, "I'm in love with you," and then kisses her.

One interpretation we can take from this is that we as the viewer first see Gil on the right as right. If we suspend our disbelief, Gil could be a time traveler. But if we look closer, Gil appears on the left, and is in love with a fantasy, while Inez, on the left, is the reality of this. Similarly, if we aren't paying attention, we're likely to believe that Gil is talking to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Zelda, and the Impressionists. But if we look closer, they seem more like satires of them that anyone could make up without knowing a lot about their backgrounds, which leads us as the viewers to think that Gil make them up in his head.

Another scene that leads us to believe that Gil is fantasizing is the scene we looked at in class where Gil, Paul, and Inez are in the Louvre. The group is shot from a far in the room where Monet has paintings of the pond. I think this could mean that Gil is further from the truth because he is now looking at recreations of the pond.







Comments

  1. Jordan SilversmithNovember 18, 2018 at 7:45 PM

    While I agree with your point that Gil's time travel experience is not a literal event, I feel that it is important to treat it as such in the context of the movie. It must be interpreted as his development as a character, both as a writer and through his realization of Inez's affair. By writing this off as insanity, the positive effect of his development is ignored, and the true meaning of the movie is not realized.

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