Ever noticed how since Manhattan, Woody Allen seems to feel obliged to begin his films with dull scene setters, showing off the city he’s filming in and not really showing off his talent at all? Any one can point their camera at the Eiffel Tower or Louvre and make viewers smile at Parisian architecture, but it’s hardly innovative filmmaking.
Fortunately, and to my delight, the critical consensus has turned out to be spot on. Despite the worryingly familiar opening, what follows is not the Allen of recent years in any respect. Midnight in Paris comes to us six months after the God-awful career-low of You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, and the contrast in creativity couldn’t be any crazier. This is lovely, charming, featherlight cinema, where most of Mr. Allen’s recent efforts have only managed to be the latter. It’s easily his best film of the past decade, thus showing that, for whatever reason, an apparently stale process in which he churned out a film a year can still pay out in silver dollars, and eventually reward the patient.
The film is a return to the touch of magic and fantasy we got in Sleeper and Zelig. Owen Wilson plays a struggling writer called Gil, who seeks inspiration for his work by strolling the streets of Paris. He’s married to an pretty but unimaginative American girl with Republican parents who disapprove of his artsy inclinations, and the early jokes centre around this unfortunate setup, and exchanges with the couple’s intellectually snobbish friend who can talk about art better than Gil can.
Gil finds himself back in 1920 – his Golden Age Utopia – sharing drinks with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, getting Gertrude Stein to give feedback on his novel and flirting with Picasso’s latest mistress. It would be very easy to overdo the ‘my God, I can’t believe this is happening’ line here, but fortunately the amount it is used feels just right. Aside from the delights that just naturally attach themselves to observing the details of this situation, there’s a handful of ingenious gags we should really see coming sooner. Gil, like the Allen of old, frets constantly about death, so meeting the stoical Hemingway over wine obviously turns out to be a match made in comedic heaven. The same goes for Gil’s attempts to explain his bizarre time travelling situation to Bunuel and Dali, who calmly nod at a story that coheres with their surrealist mindset.
Having to return to the modern world in the day time, and keep the pleasures of the past for midnight, is the only drag in the film, but I suppose that’s the point. The film seems keen to stress the way every generation imagines the past as a vintage era, and fails to see the quality of the present. It’s hard to believe now, but people will, surely, look back on the 2000s and say ‘imagine living whilst those artists were at work.’ But who? Day-Lewis? the Coens? Nolan? Murakami? Who knows! Even Stein casually talks to Picasso evidently ignorant of how her name and his will turn out to be of cult, revered status in a century’s time.
And the film is also, of course, about the omnipresent Allen theme of how maybe we should not care if we are part of a meaningless universe, because as Gil puts it, at least by being in a place like Paris we can construct our own meaning and delightful experiences regardless of the coldness of Neptune.
