With Midnight in Paris Woody Allen pulls up his socks and comes out a winner
For years now those Woody Allen aficionados amongst us have approached his newest offerings through a sense of stubborn nostalgic hope he’s got another Manhattan or Broadway Danny Rose in him. And for that same amount of time those aficionados have gradually become occasional apologists sticking up for the better bits — few and far between — in films such as Anything Else and Hollywood Ending.
With the release of each new film we attempt to sway the unconvinced around us into believing that Woody is back in full effect. No other filmmaker has so often “returned to form” film after film after film. Yet recent successes like Vicky Christina Barcelona and Match Point not only make our case for Allen’s prowess as a master filmmaker but also how the good ones as of late seem to be the ones where he stays put behind the camera.
And so it comes as sweet surprise that with Midnight in Paris Allen refers back to the imaginative leaps through time of The Purple Rose of Cairo by transplanting California screenwriter Gil Pender (Owen Wilson as the de rigueur Allen stand-in) in 1920s Paris. While his days are spent camped up in a hotel room working on a novel — and avoiding his fiancée Inez (a flat-line Rachel McAdams) and her pretentious friend Paul (Michael Sheen) — a series of “midnight walks” mysteriously brings Pender into the company of Hemingway Fitzgerald Dali (Adrien Brody) and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) who even proofs his first draft.
As a visual valentine to the City of Light Midnight in Paris settles in Allen’s filmography as an en français counterpart to his ultimate mash note to a city Manhattan . Opening with a lengthy series of golden-hued shots of the city — cheekily including views of several cinemas where the film presently screens in Paris — Allen displays a love for somewhere other than his New York home turf not particularly present in his British or Spanish-set films of recent years.
Much like Manhattan’s story of an unlikely love torn apart by an insurmountable generational gap (albeit in this case separated by far more years than those between Allen and Mariel Hemingway as his jail-bait girlfriend) Pender’s late-night romantic interludes with Adriana (Marion Cotillard a beauty perfectly befitting Paris’ Golden Age) prove just as impossible to maintain.
Via Adriana’s longing for the pre-war belle époque Gil comes to the sad-hearted realization that losing oneself to nostalgia offers very little in the way of genuine escape. To Adriana the 1920s that Gil lusts for are as boring as the 2010 he’s hoping to get away from — despite bedding Picasso and Hemingway in her own time she’d give it all up for a chance to mingle with Matisse and Toulouse-Lautrec. Stepping back into the present we’re left with the realization of nostalgia’s inabilities to completely fulfil and that what we do with our given time at hand is what matters. But heck at least we’ll always have Paris – and us Allen aficionados and apologists now have Midnight in Paris too.
