Review of Midnight in Paris

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.  Ernest Hemingway

Everybody has his “dream city” or maybe not city, but a place where all dreams come true. For someone it’s the Eternal city – Rome, for others – hectic London or Barcelona, for the successful Hollywood screenwriter Gil Pender such a place is Paris. Paris of the 1920s, the cradle of great artists and authors.

Gil (Owen Wilson) with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) come to Paris on vacation where Gil is struggling to finish his first novel, while Inez dismisses his notions of the city and the idea that the 1920s was the golden age. Romantic Gil likes Paris especially in the rain. He adores the rain, small restaurants, green parks and numerous bridges with ancient street lamps. He really wants to live in 1920s Paris – a time and place with which he is obsessed.

One night Gil wanders alone the streets of Paris, but he gets lost. When the clock strikes midnight an antique car pulls up and the passengers dressed in 20s clothing urge Gil to join them. Later he comes to realize that he has been transported to 1920 where he encounters composer Cole Porter, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, an American writer and art collector Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway and others. Gil’s dream comes true - he finds himself in the 20s of the past century in the belle époque. However, in the morning he finds he has returned to 2010.

The main character is so happy to stay with his idols, the most brilliant artistic persons of the 20^th century and over the next few days he waits for midnight to be transported to that fabulous past. Gil spending more and more time with Adriana (Marion Cotillard) who leaves Picasso and has a brief flirt with Hemingway realizes that he is falling in love with her, and this takes him closer to the heart of the city but further from the real world where there is a woman he’s about to marry.

At first glance “Midnight in Paris” is a light romantic comedy, but looking inside more deeply it’s possible to realize that there is no universal conflict between good and evil, there is no great theme of love, but it’s a story about a man who desires to dream and remember our past. This is a philosophical film, like all of Woody Allen’s films about people who think that they live in a wrong time and they need to find that unforgettable “la belle époque”. Every time the dissonance between the present and the past becomes stronger and more evident. The genius screenwriter emphasizes the romantic and realistic elements, more than the fantasy elements. Living in the modern world Gil understands that the past will always charm and attract him, but staying in the past means to suffer from the nostalgia of looking for something better.

As in all of Woody Allen’s films, the actors act easily and with a great pleasure. Owen Wilson is fascinating in typical Allen trousers and checked shirt as a hopeless romantic writer. There is no doubt that Gil is Allen’s prototype, but younger and perhaps more attractive. The French actress, Marion Cotillard, is smart and very sweet as Picasso’s and Modigliani’s muse. Adrien Brody’s role (as Salvador Dalì) is probably his best role since “The Pianist” (2002) - the small one, but memorable. The film’s real star, of course, is Paris, seductive and glowing in all it’s eras.

The film has been cited as one of Allen’s best films in recent years. In 2012 it won both the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Golden Globe Awards for Best Screenplay.

Excellent romantic atmosphere, fascinating French, magic Paris in the rain -  only for this you ought to watch “Midnight in Paris”! A perfect casting choice (the director includes local French actors when filming in another country), excellent music compositions by Stephane Wrembel, the French jazz guitarist, a gorgeous setting with splendid costumes make a 94-minute film by Woody Allen a romantic and enjoyable film about love, dreams and beauty!

P.S. What are you going to do at midnight in Paris?

Dina Chashchinova