Midnight in Paris

& Gil: This is unbelievable! Look at this! There’s no city like this in the world. There never was!
    Inez: You act like you’ve never been here before.
    Gil: I don’t get here often enough. That’s the problem.

& Paul: Nostalgia is denial — denial of the painful present... the name for this denial is golden age thinking — the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one ones living in — its a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with the present.

& John: I’m not a big Francophile...
    Helen: John hates their politics.
    Gil: Certainly been no friend to the United States. Well, I mean, you can’t exactly blame them for not following us down that rabbit’s hole in Iraq. The whole Bush, you know...
    Inez: Oh, please! Let’s not get into this bad discussion again and again.
    Gil: Honey, honey. We’re not getting into... By the way, it’s fine for your father and I to disagree. That’s what a democracy is. Your father defends the right-wing of the Republican party, and I happen to think you almost got to be like... a demented lunatic, but it’s like...
    Inez: Okay. Okay!
    Gil: But it doesn’t mean we don’t respect each other’s views, am I right?
    Inez: Can we talk about the wedding plans?

& Zelda Fitzgerald: I’m Zelda, by the way. Oh, Scott! Scott!
    F. Scott Fitzgerald: Yes, what it is, sweetheart?
    Zelda: Here’s a writer, from, um... where?
    Gil: California.
    Fitzgerald: Scott Fitzgerald, and who are you, old sport?
    Gil: Gil... the... You have the same names as...
    Fitzgerald: As what?
    Gil: Scott Fitzgerald and...
    Fitzgerald: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The Fitzgeralds. Isn’t she beautiful?

& Fitzgerald: You’ll forgive me. I’ve been mixing grain and grape. Now, this a writer. uh... Gil. Yes?
    Gil: Gil... Gil Pender.
    Fitzgerald: Gil Pender. Hemingway.
    Gil: Hemingway?
    Ernest Hemingway: You liked my book?
    Gil: Liked? I loved! All your work.
    Hemingway: Yes, it was a good book, because it was an honest book, and that’s what war does to men. And there’s nothing fine and noble about dying in the mud, unless you die gracefully, and then it’s not only noble, but brave.

& Hemingway: What’re you writing?
    Gil: A novel.
    Hemingway: ’Bout what?
    Gil: It’s about a man who works in a nostalgia shop.
    Hemingway: What the hell is a nostalgia shop?
    Gil: A place where they sell old things. Memorabilia. And... Does that sound terrible?
    Hemingway: No subject is terrible if the story is true. If the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.

& Hemingway: The assignment was to take the hill. There were 4 of us. 5 if you counted Vicente, but he had lost his hand when a grenade went off and couldn’t fight as he could when I first met him. And he was young, and brave. And the hill was soggy* from days of rain, and the hill sloped down toward a road, and there were many German soldiers on the road. And the idea was to aim for the first group, and if our aim was true, we could delay them.

& Gil: Were you scared?
    Hemingway: Of what?
    Gil: Getting killed?
    Hemingway: You’ll never write well if you’re afraid of dying. Do you?
    Gil: Yeah, I do. I’d say it’s probably... maybe my greatest fear, actually.
    Hemingway: Well, that’s something all men before you have done. All men will do.

& Hemingway: Have you ever made love to a truly great woman?
    Gil: Actually, my fiancée is pretty sexy.
    Hemingway: And when you make love to her, you feel true, and beautiful passion, and you, for at least that moment, lose your fear of death.
    Gil: No. That doesn’t happen.
    Hemingway: I believe that love that is true and real creates a respite from death. All cowardice comes from not loving, or not loving well, which is the same thing. And when the man who is brave and true looks Death squarely in the face like some rhino-hunters I know, or Belmonte, who’s truly brave. It is because they love with sufficient passion, to push death out of their minds, until it returns, as it does, to all men. And then you must make really good love again. Think about it.

Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall In Love”

♪ And that’s why birds do it ♪
♪ Bees do it ♪
♪ Even educated fleas do it ♪
♪ Let’s do it ♪
♪ Let’s fall in love ♪
♪ In Spain, the best upper-sets do it ♪
♪ Lithuanians and Letts do it ...♪
♪ Oysters down in Oyster Bay do it ♪
♪ Let’s do it ♪
♪ Let’s fall in love ♪
♪ Cold Cape Cod clams ♪
♪ ’gainst their wish, do it ♪
♪ Even lazy jellyfish do it ♪
♪ Let’s do it, Let’s fall in love ♪

---

& Adriana: I... came here to study with Coco Chanel, and I fell in love with Paris, and also, a very dark-eyed, haunted Jewish-Italian painter. And I knew Amedeo had another woman, but still, I couldn’t resist moving into his apartment when he asked, and it was a beautiful six months.
    Gil: M... M... Modigliani? You lived with... You lived with Modigliani?

& Gil: I’m Gil Pender. I was with Hemingway, and Picasso. Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway. I’m Gil Pender, from Pasadena! Cub Scouts. I failed freshman English. Little old Gil Pender has his novel with Gertrude. Stein! Boy, that girl was so... lovely.

& Helen: You sound skeptical.
    John: No. I’ve seen what he earns, but sometimes I think he’s got a... got a... part missing, and I didn’t like his remark about Tea Party Republicans. They are decent people trying to take back the country. They are not crypto-fascist airhead zombies. You hear him say that?

& Adriana: I’ve never heard of Valium. What is this?
    Gil: It’s the... pill of the future.

& Adriana: Well, I... I... prefer to be by myself for a while, but thank you for the evening.
    Gil: Bye.
    Salvador Dalí: Monsieur? C’est un dommage. C’est un dommage. We met, earlier tonight... At the party! Dalí, oui?

& Dalí: I love the language! The French! The waiters? No. You like the shape of the rhinoceros?

& Dalí: Pen-der! Yes. And I am Dalí!
    Gil: Dalí.
    Dalí: Yes. You have to remember. Pender is in a perplexing situation.
    Gil: It sounds so crazy to say. You guys are going to think I’m drunk, but I have to tell someone. I’m... from a... a different time. Another era. The future. OK? I come... from the 2000th millenium to here. I get in a car, and I slide through time.
    Man Ray: Exactly correct. You inhabit two worlds. So far, I see nothing strange.
    Gil: Yeah, you’re surrealists! But I’m a normal guy.

& Man Ray: There is another woman?
    Gil: Adriana. Yes, and I’m... very drawn to her. I find her extremely alluring. The problem is that other men, great artists — geniuses — also find her alluring, and she finds them.
    Man Ray: So, there’s that... A man in love with a woman from a different era. I see a photograph.
    Luis Buñuel: I see a film.
    Gil: I see an insurmountable problem.
    Dalí: I see... a rhinoceros.

& Gil: Do you think that’s possible, to love two women at once?
    Museum Guide (by Carla Bruni for a sec): Well, he loved them both, but in a different way.
    Gil: You know... That’s very... That’s very French. You guys are way... you know... much... more evolved in that department than we are.

& Gil: Whoa, whoa, whoa! Hey! Hey! Thank you for stopping. Gil Pender.
    Eliot: Tom Eliot.
    Gil: Tom Eliot? Tom Stearns Eliot? T.S. Eliot? T.S. Eliot?
    Eliot: Pender.
    Gil: Prufrock’s like my mantra!

& Gertrude Stein: We’re just in the middle of a little personal crisis.
    Gil: Oh, OK. Should I come back? I don’t want to interrupt.
    Stein: No, it’s no secret. Adriana has left Pablo, and has flown to Africa with Hemingway.

& Inez: Gil isn’t coming to Mont Saint-Michel.
    John: Why not? I don’t understand it!
    Inez: Because, he writes. He rewrites. He rewrites the rewrites, you know? He says, “Picasso never left his studio.” I said, “Gil, you have absolutely nothing in common with Picasso.” He just looks at me.

& Inez: I didn’t like that maid. I didn’t like her from the beginning.
    Gil: She was sweet. She was pleasant. She was upbeat!
    Inez: You always take the side of the help, as usual! That’s why Daddy says you’re a communist.

& Stein: Oh, Pender! I was just telling Matisse we’re going to buy one of his paintings for our personal collection. I think 500 Francs is fair.
    Gil: 500 Francs for a Matisse?! Yeah, I think that sounds fair.

& Gil: Oh, Mr. Buñuel! I had a nice idea for a movie for you.
    Buñuel: Yes?
    Gil: A group of people attend a very formal dinner party. At the end of dinner, when they try to leave the room, they can’t.
    Buñuel: Why not?
    Gil: They just can’t seem to exit the door.
    Buñuel: B... But why?
    Gil: Well, momento, when they’re forced to stay together, the veneer* of civilization quickly fades away, and what you’re left with is who they really are: animals.
    Buñuel: But I don’t get it. Why don’t they just walk out of the room?
    Gil: All I’m saying is just think about. Who knows? Maybe when you’re shaving one day, it’ll tickle your fancy.
    Buñuel: I don’t understand. What’s holding them in the room?

& Adriana: You look so sad.
    Gil: Because life is too mysterious.
    Adriana: This is the time we live in. Everything moves so fast. Life is noisy and complicated.

& Lautrec: Savez que moi je présenter Monsieur Gauguin and Monsieur Degas? {...}
    Adriana: See the sketch he’s made? Nobody can draw like this today. Not Picasso. Not Matisse. {...}
    Gauguin: Degas and I were just talking about how this... this generation is empty, and is missing imagination. Better to have lived during the... la Renaissance.
    Adriana: No! This is the golden age.
    Degas: Not at all. The Renaissance is much better.

& Gil: I’m from 2010.
    Adriana: What do you mean?
    Gil: I dropped in on you the same way we’re dropping in on the 1890s.
    Adriana: You did?
    Gil: I was trying to escape my present the same way you’re trying to escape yours, to a golden age.
    Adriana: Surely you don’t think the ’20s are a golden age!
    Gil: Well, yeah. To me they are.
    Adriana: But I’m from the ’20s, and I’m telling you the golden age is La Belle Époque.
    Gil: And look at these guys. I mean, to them, their golden age was the Renaissance. You know, they’re trade Belle Époque to be painting alongside Titian and Michelango. And those guys probably imagined life was a lot better when Kublai Khan was around.

& Gil: I had a dream the other night, where it was like a nightmare, where I ran out of Zithromax. And then I went to the dentist, and he didn’t have any Novocaine. You see what I’m saying? These people don’t have any antibiotics.
    Adriana: What are you talking about?

& Stein: Hemingway read the chapters, too, and he thinks...
    Gil: He read it?!
    Stein: ...he thinks it’s going to be a fine book. But he did have one plot suggestion.
    Gil: What’s the suggestion?
    Stein: Well, he doesn’t quite believe that the protagonist doesn’t see that his fiancée is having an affair right before his eyes.
    Gil: With?..
    Stein: The other character. The pedantic one.
    Gil: That’s called denial.

& Inez: Paul and I?! Where did you get such an insane notion?
    Gil: Where? From Ernest Hemingway.

& Gil: Goodbye, Inez.
    John: Say hi to Trotsky.

--
soggy — сырой; мокрый; нудный; пропитанный водой
veneer — облицовка; внешний налет; наружный слой

+ quotes on the Imdb.

__ Brilliant. Fantastic. Masterpiece.
Such a crowded place this Paris in 1920s, BTW.