Oh the Anemoia

Escape into 1920s Paris with Niamh McGonnell-Hall as she analyses the duality of anemoia in the film Midnight in Paris.

This article contains spoilers for the film Midnight in Paris

Anemoia: the deep sense of nostalgia and longing for a time you have never experienced. Sometimes brought on by an object. An old typewriter, an antique chair, the elaborate filigree of 19th-century architecture.

The longing for the simplicity or even the novelty of a bygone era is a significant part of the nostalgia we experience today. I find myself at times wishing that it were 1999 and Chandler Bing was calling my landline because mobile phones were nonexistent. Take it a step further, and Midnight in Paris (2011), directed and written by Woody Allen, has us wishing for the Parisian 1920s. 

A star-studded cast, including Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Alison Pill, Tom Hiddleston, Kathy Bates and Adrien Brody, captures a world where time travel via a 1920s taxi is possible. Unlike the TARDIS, this time machine is not bigger on the inside. There is no clattering whirlpool of a time vortex; instead, time slips away like a soft haze, only adding to the sleepy peace that is generated by the 20s midnight streets. 

Let's just ignore the fact that women still couldn’t vote in France in the 1920s, and instead focus on our intense desire for speakeasies, champagne saucers and feathered headbands. 

Gil (Owen Wilson) and Inez (Rachel McAdams) visit Paris before they are to be married, with Inez connecting with friends, and Gil, a writer, absorbing the art of the lost 20th century. Instantly, the anemoia is there. Gil is us, daydreaming of an era we have never experienced, bored and unsatisfied with our present. We are as enraptured as he is in nostalgia for a time that is both a stranger to us and our closest friend. 

After unknowingly stepping out of the old taxi into the past, a wonderlust Gil stumbles into a party for Jean Cocteau, teeming with 1920s icons of the art scene. A pure gift to literature nostalgics, Allen gives us a young F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) and his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald (Alison Pill), who was an author in her own right, to leave us craving this time long gone. As bystanders, we watch as Gil flails about, trying to decipher where or when he is. 

An attempted trip back to the hotel to retrieve his manuscript for Gertrude Stein sends Gil hurtling back to the present, the sheen of the 1920s still dancing across our skin. On his next dive into the past century, he meets Adriana, the fictional lover of Pablo Picasso, adding to the rich artistic menagerie that Gil has found. 

And here, the well of nostalgia which we have begun to swim in deepens further, with Adriana’s longing for the Belle Époque in the 1890s. Together, Gil and Adriana go further back, boarding a gilded carriage instead of a motorcar, to the Moulin Rouge and the Can-Can. They both detest their present times, but Gil questions why Adriana would want to leave the perfection of her 1920s Golden Age. And so, the complex web of nostalgia starts to creep across our minds as we realise the greatest question of reminiscing. 

We in the 21st century long for the idealised past, whenever that may be, just as people in our idealised past, in turn, longed for an escape further back. The grass is greener on the other side. We long for what we do not have. 

Anemoia is a daydream. A pleasant one, yes, but it is also a lesson. A lesson that is packaged up for us by Gil, who decides to stay in his own 21st-century Paris, having left his cheating fiancée, and Adriana, who progresses past her brief longing for the Belle Époque, and decides to stay in the 1890s, leaving the 1920s for her present. 

And so, anemoia is not quite a reflection on the past, but in fact, a reflection on the present. A fanciful mirage we weave for ourselves to dispel our dissatisfaction with our own time. That makes it sound like a bad thing. It isn’t. It is a reminder of appreciation for what we have now, and a celebration of the ever-living past. 

We cannot go back. We cannot go forward either. All we have is now. Midnight in Paris teaches us, in its romantic and wishful way, to stay present. And perhaps redecorate.