Cannes 2011 Review: Woody Allen's MIDNIGHT IN PARIS
rating: 4
Midnight in Paris, which debuted on the Croisette at the 11am press screening opening of the Cannes Film Festival is a surprisingly delightful excursion into a cultured man's fantasies perhaps and probably Woody Allen's own nostalgic wish to have been born in a different time and place. WARNING - The marketing team behind Midnight in Paris have done a terrific job of keeping the neat concept of the movie under-wraps and hidden by sleight of hand misdirection, so although there are no real spoilers ahead, I know I certainly enjoyed the movie more for not knowing what it actually was going in. Full review follows... It's an interesting riff of the concept, oddly enough, of Nicolas Lyndhurst's Goodnight Sweetheart British sitcom, but this time with our lead falling in love with a girl from the 1920's who actually knew the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. In fact we get to meet them over the course of the movie and every other musician, painter, film director and novelist of the time, all played by well known actors and wheeled out on a conveyer belt of cameos and supporting parts for early 20th century art and literature luminaries. It's a charming movie, the likes that Allen hasn't made in so long and it's definitely from the 'good' Woody Allen shelf, worthy of discussion in the top three of his works from the past ten years alongside Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona say, rather than Cassandra's Dream or Scoop. It's even a notch or two higher than his last two movies Whatever Works and You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, but certainly more fanciful and with less drama. It's more enjoyable importantly and funnier too, and it has a clear trajectory from start to finish that is more plain sailing... the movie more satisfying as a whole.
Midnight in Paris opens with a two minute postcard symphony snapshot sequence showing us all the famous and iconic views of the romantic city and scored by Sidney Bechets slightly odd Si tu vois ma mère, (Yes, I did have to look that up) but there's no life to any of the images... Allen is searching desperately for the human equilivant of love, in this the city of love. The sequence goes on too long but decidedly so. Allen is desperately searching like cupid with his bow and arrow for the spark of genuine romantic feeling somewhere in the vast city that lives up to it's name but he can't find one. The real telling shot is that of the Eiffel Tower on an odd angle near an empty and instantly forgettable side street the Paris we know from great tales of yesteryearis it now painfully out of reach? 
In a five star hotel (is this the modern love of Paris?) Owen Wilson (who fits the movie like a glove by the way, for those concerned) plays a struggling novelist and hack screenwriter named Gil who comes to Paris with his highly organised fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her parents but his attention seems to be elsewhere. Sight seeing the city as a checklist of things to see and be quickly consumed is not what he is about. He is a dreamer, a wannabe visionary and he loves it's history, it's mood - he regrets not moving there permanently when he was a young man and it inspires him to write the book that he has always wanted to scribe but the delay of which has been bogged down by the need for money that only his mindless film work can bring. He also lacks confidence but so would I in his situation. His fiancee doesn't think he has it in him to be a man of literature and his chances aren't particularly helped by the introduction of an old Professor and crush in his fiancee's life, the 'psudeo-intellectual' played with real relish by Michael Sheen. In perhaps my favourite of his roles when not playing a real life person, Sheen plays a snobbery and supposedly super intelligent middle-class guy who seems to know everything about well everything and will jump at the opportunity to tell you about the history and true meaning of a painting say, if not really to inform you but to just so he knows, you know, he knows. McAdams' character remembers why she liked him so much, presumably because he's knowledgeable and he could always tell her something she didn't know, though there's definitely hints in Sheen's character that he simply visits Wikipedia to study ever piece of art before making his way to the museum. Either way, Gil's fiancee is smitten. 
Not interested in seeing his girl fall in love with another man before his eyes or hearing the Professor drone on about the facts of art and not the emotion of it, Gil goes gallivanting on the streets of the French capital to try and uncover the Paris that exists in his own imagination. This is where an adventure into the rainy 1920's of Paris that Gil has always (and perhaps still is?) dreaming about begins and the real joy of the movie is it's handling of 'time-trip' science fiction but never explaining the uncanny and the impossibilities of Gil mingling with these dead icons in a different era every night. Here he spends time in the company of Scott Fitzgerald and Zara Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston & I can't remember the blonde actress playing Zelda, sorry), he drinks red wine with Dali (Adrien Brody!) who talks to him as if he already is a successful novelist and compares his sad eyes to that of a rhineosauraus (!), to the photographer Man Ray (who perfectly understands that Owen Wilson has time traveled to which Gil replies, "yes, but you are a surrealist!") and the film director Luis Bunuel (who doesn't understand why Gill's idea for a movie about guests who arrive at a dinner party but can't leave would be logical "why can't they leave? I don't understand?"). He also manages to get his book critiqued by Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). Yeah, only wannabe novelists could dream this vividly. 
The woman he falls in love with is an 'art groupie' and sometimes lover of Picasso, Braque and Modigliana, played by an always captivating Marion Cotillard. Perhaps here, in Cotillard's Woody Allen debut, he has found himself a new muse to obsess over the way he has in the past for Scarlett Johansson and Penelope Cruz. You certainly couldn't blame him if he did. Gil is taken by Cotillard's charms and she him but the real dilemma of the movie is his life with his fiance. He is successful, prosperous and although it's not writing novels, screenwriting is a close cousin and it's making him rich, if not quite for the reasons he wants. Is it better to be content with life than harbour a dream that may not be reachable? Why reach for the stars when you already have a great deal going for you already. It's the 'is the grass really greener' theme that runs through the majority of Woody Allen's movies, and very much deconstructed in his last film, and it's at the forefont here. I really enjoyed Midnight in Paris this morning if you can't tell... I found it witty, funny, immensely enjoyable and with a real sense of purpose that perhaps has been missing from some of Allen's more recent works. The Cannes crowd certainly loved it... though unless you have more than even a fleeting grasp of literature, then the in-jokes will likely swoop straight over your head. 
Midnight in Paris opens May 20th in the U.S. and on limited release in France today. No U.K. is yet. Bring the festival experience home this year on Blu-ray Disc keep up to date with all the latest Blu-ray news at the Blu-ray Disc Reporter.