Midnight in Paris

Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard
Director: Woody Allen
Category: IIB (English and French)

Midway through Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, parts of the novel by the film's protagonist - the neurotic screenwriter Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) - are read out. Among the highlights is a rumination on nostalgia - how vulgar things eventually become magical after the passage of time, and the yearning for some obscure, past golden age is inevitable, human but somehow misguided. It is an insightful observation and an ironic one, given that Midnight in Paris is drenched in rose-tinted nostalgia for a past cleansed of inconvenient problems and social discontent - after all, the film's opening sequence is a series of picture-postcard images of the city.

Allen's 41st film is an amusing affair laden with generous doses of sardonic wit and deadpan humour. It is at once an affirmation of the New York director's love for Europe (in recent years he has made four films in London and one in Barcelona, and his next one is set in Rome) and a revisiting of themes and types from hits such as Manhattan and The Purple Rose of Cairo. Most of Allen's pet hates are presented in the film's first half-hour through Gil's travails during his stay in Paris. There's the shallow young woman with whom he constantly bickers, here embodied by Gil's fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams), who dismisses his amour for bohemian life and screeches 'Oh God, I can never live outside the US!'; there's the bullying pseudo-intellectual, in the shape of Paul (Michael Sheen), the academic whose airy-fairy proclamations about art fascinate Inez, to Gil's dismay; and there are the stock philistine Americans in the form of Inez's parents, the father (Kurt Fuller) a supporter of the tea party movement and the mother (Mimi Kennedy) a materialist matriarch who frowns on Gil's ideals.

As Gil confronts the scepticism about his literary dreams and his love for an imagined Paris of the past, he finds his nirvana one night when he gets into a vintage Peugeot and emerges out of the car into the Paris of the 1920s, where he gets to meet and befriend his idols. On his frequent fantastical visits, he is cherished by these people: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill) introduce him to famous friends at opulent parties. Gil falls for the charms of Adriana (Marion Cotillard, above with Wilson), a woman who has slept with Picasso and Hemingway but now finds Gil more attractive. Eventually Gil realises the error of his nostalgic ways when, in another jump into the past, the pair land in the Belle Epoque, which Adriana in turn considers superior to her own era of the 1920s.

However entertaining Midnight in Paris can be at times, viewers, too, end up nostalgic for the innovation and fresh quirkiness of Allen's earlier oeuvre.

Midnight in Paris opens today