Film review: Midnight in Paris

In recent years, Woody Allen tends to swing between the sublime and the ridiculous with his filmmaking (and…insert own dig about his personal life >here<). He is quite prolific, making a film every year. But how the same person could have made the gorgeous Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona and the craptastic Cassandra’s Dream just a year apart beats me! I'm still a fan because when he's on form, he's a genius. Annie Hall and Mighty Aphrodite are two of my favourite films. Midnight in Paris, thankfully, was surprising in a good way.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, an American screenwriter holidaying in Paris with his awful fiancée (Rachel McAdams) and her family. Gil yearns to live in Europe and is working on a novel. While Inez fawns over a pedantic college friend (Michael Sheen), he takes long walks through the boulevards and backstreets. Every night, when the clock strikes midnight, he is transported back to Paris in the roaring twenties when it was an artistic haven. He meets his heroes as contemporaries including F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, TS Eliot, Salvador Dali... the whole gang is here, and partying hard by the look of it!

Gil falls for Adriana—Pablo Picasso’s mistress and muse. But he returns each morning to reality. The irony is: While Gil has always longed to live in 1920s Paris, Adriana longs to live during La Belle Époque—the late 19th century. Will he eventually choose to stay in one past, or another? The whole premise of the film is bizarre and it shouldn't work BUT it just does. It's actually very charming.

The opening of the film is like a tourism promo for Paris, showing all the famous landmarks. A lot more well-known sights are threaded throughout—wandering through/by the Museé D’Orsay, the palace/gardens of Versailles, the book stands around Pont Neuf and the flea markets. The city has never looked better than through Allen's lens and when it descends into the past, it’s even more alluring. Gil is swept away by the romance of everything, but soon realises that life’s dilemmas don’t just evaporate no matter what era you're in.

Wilson is a bit of an unlikely protagonist but he’s great as Gil, who is good humoured, neurotic and has an endearing childlike enthusiasm. Inez and her family are stereotypical American tourists, in the worst way. McAdams hasn’t been so bitchy in a film since Mean Girls. Michael Sheen is brilliant as the pretentious Paul. Hemingway (Corey Stoll) is the most entertaining of the figures of the past. The novelist (in the film anyway) speaks exactly how he writes-in a frank and spartan manner. The seriousness in his tone is inadvertently hilarious i.e. “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…” It goes on and on like this. Marion Cotillard is good as Adriana as are her fellow French compatriots in the cast—Carla Bruni and Léa Seydoux.

The script is Allen at his best—witty, quirky, playful and full of intelligent observations about people. Midnight in Paris is pure escapism and I would highly recommend it.