Midnight in Paris (2011)
Directed by Woody Allen
While on a trip to Paris with his fiancée's family, a nostalgic screenwriter finds himself mysteriously going back to the 1920s every day at midnight.
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My favorite sequence was a snappy reference to Luis Buñuel’s masterpiece The Exterminating Angel in a hilarious encounter between Gil and the elite director.
Allen tweaks cinematic history by having Gil suggest the plot of "The Exterminating Angel" to Dali's pal Luis Bunuel (Adrien de Van, "In My Skin") who fails to see any sense in it while Man Ray (Tom Cordier) finds nothing odd about Gil's tale of time travel ('But you're a surrealist!' replies Gil).
There, he boozes it up with Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll, killing it), finds a first reader for his manuscript in Gertrude Stein (Bates), and on a lark pitches future filmmaker Luis Buñuel the plot of the eternally baffling The Exterminating Angel ("But what does it mean?!" Buñuel puzzles after him – indeed).
After the stroke of midnight, Gil is transported to the Paris of the 1920s, where he rubs psyches with Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Dali, Luis Bunuel, et al. (There's a playful allusion to Bunuel's classic The Exterminating Angel, 1962).
And it’s in the film’s most irreverent, introspective moment that Gil pitches Buñuel the idea for the Spanish filmmaker’s own The Exterminating Angel , whose story, about upper-class types unable to leave the prison of their own making, is believable as an account of Gil’s own life.
Intelligent, insightful, and inspired in ways that recall Allen's best movies (cue, yes, nostalgia), it's playful and absurd, evoking Annie Hall and The Purple Rose of Cairo, but it also firmly reminds us that Allen is as vital as ever, with so much still to say about art and love and quietly desperate moments, even if it comes wrapped in his ever-familiar box.
One must submit to relaxed rhythms of “Midnight in Paris”, which definitely echoes back some to Allen’s own “The Purple Rose of Cairo”, but that’s not at all a difficult task.
A magical-realist gem harking back to "The Purple Rose of Cairo," "Midnight" is a bit thin and glib to call a masterpiece - at 75, Allen is unlikely to have another one of those in him - but it's still a delicious trifle for anyone who has ever dreamt of bantering about the cinema with Luis Buñuel or lounging at the piano to hear Cole Porter sing "Let's Do It."
Large portions of Midnight in Paris reminded me more of A Night at the Museum than The Purple Rose of Cairo.
It’s a charming, fanciful comedy in the vein of “Bullets over Broadway” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” the kind of movie I honestly thought Woody had lost the knack for.
Allen just breezes past all that, the way he did in his great The Purple Rose of Cairo and, before that, in his 1977 short story ?The Kugelmass Episode.? Actually, the twenties scenes recall another Allen story, ?A Twenties Memory,? which is full of passages as blissful as this: ?Hemingway had just finished two short stories about prize fighting, and while Gertrude Stein and I both thought they were decent, we agreed they still needed much work ?
Whether you prefer the “early, funny ones” like “Sleeper” or his romantic comedies like “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” or his later serious comedies like “Hannah And Her Sisters” and “Crimes And Misdemeanors,” the new Woody Allen film was something to be anticipated.
In only its third week in U.S. theaters, it expands today to more than 940 screens, making it the most available Woody Allen movie since the director's "Manhattan"/"Annie Hall" heyday (with the puzzling exception of 2003's already-forgotten "Anything Else," with "American Pie" star Jason Biggs).
But her parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy) are temporarily in Paris, and so is her pretentious ex-beau Paul (Michael Sheen, channeling Michael Murphy from "Manhattan"), so Inez keeps herself busy while Gil goes out to soak up the rain and inspiration.
His depiction of the privileged — ostentatiously devoid of other classes and races — might have been something to aspire to when “Manhattan” came out, but it’s painfully divorced from reality now when so many well-to-do people have been hit by the dot-com bubble, ponzi schemes or what have you.
The closest Allen came to showing how to live like a romantic in a world full of pain and dissatisfaction was Manhattan -- a film that is arguably his best and ends with a wise teenager reminding Woody’s middle-aged character that you have to have a little faith in people.
Allen opens the film "Manhattan"-style, with a series of love-letter shots to the French capital, mixing anonymous side-street cafes with iconic landmarks, progressing from day to evening to late night.
Whether you prefer the “early, funny ones” like “Sleeper” or his romantic comedies like “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan,” or his later serious comedies like “Hannah And Her Sisters” and “Crimes And Misdemeanors,” the new Woody Allen film was something to be anticipated.
In only its third week in U.S. theaters, it expands today to more than 940 screens, making it the most available Woody Allen movie since the director's "Manhattan"/"Annie Hall" heyday (with the puzzling exception of 2003's already-forgotten "Anything Else," with "American Pie" star Jason Biggs).
Sheen gets skewered in a time-travel version Allen's famous Marshall McLuhan gag from "Annie Hall."
Gil is already bothered by the fact that Inez would rather shop than indulge in true Parisian culture, and things are made worse by the arrival of Paul (Michael Sheen), a pretentious literary professor who loves to pontificate, that particular form of shallow intellectualism that Allen has made a constant target in his films (at least since the self-important Columbia professor waxed obnoxiously about Marshall McLuhan and Federico Fellini in Annie Hall).
Allen doesn’t do nearly enough with Gil’s return to Inez and normalcy during daylight hours, though one scene, in which Gil interrupts the insufferable Paul’s lecture on a Picasso painting by correcting him — Gil has first hand knowledge, now — is “Annie Hall” hilarious.
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But I have to advise that, if you like this kind of dish, it was done infinitely better in 1988 by Alan Rudolph in a picture called The Moderns .
Some years ago in The Moderns, Alan Rudolph tried to recreate the expatriate Parisian literary scene of the 1920s but ended up with an embarrassingly unconvincing satire.
I think it likely that Allen has also been influenced by Victor Sjöström's silent Swedish masterpiece, The Phantom Carriage, his idol Ingmar Bergman's favourite movie, which centres on a ghostly coach going around town at midnight picking up the dead.
Rachel McAdams’ natural (and considerable) charm and charisma are a perfect counterpoint to her character, who in her unlikeability actually recalls Billy Zane’s ridiculous cad in Titanic.
Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” vs. Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast”?
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Although he has crossed the Atlantic yet again for his latest, “Midnight in Paris” deliberately channels the same deep-rooted fascination with the storied 1920s as did “Zelig,” “Bullets Over Broadway” and “Sweet and Lowdown.”
The man has the ability to channel surrealism and fantasy with films like “Zelig” and “Sleeper,” and thankfully “Midnight in Paris” is a return to form.
When it does, Woody digs into his personal yesteryear to replay the magic-realism card he pulled out in Zelig and The Purple Rose of Cairo.
And the peek behind the curtain of time and reality is familiar from "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and "Zelig."
Wilson’s face is both goofy and heartbreaking in its openness, and it speaks of something we don’t often see in Allen’s movies: Genuine yearning, and not just the desire to be someone else (an idea Allen explored cogently in Zelig), but to be somewhere else, decades away from the here and now.
At the same time, this is “Zelig’’ without a spine, a work that wallows in the nostalgia it professes to puncture.
"Midnight in Paris" isn't as telling about class as Allen's "Match Point," or as celebratory and vivid about being smitten by a European city as "Vicky Cristina Barcelona."
Having already plundered London (Match Point, Scoop, Cassandra's Dream, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger) and various locations in Spain (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), it was only a matter of time before he found his way to the place that Bogie and Ingrid Bergman would always remember.
Late-era Woody has been an interesting phenomenon to watch, as his occasional hits (Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and stupefying misses (Scoop) come hard on each other’s heels.
Obviously, one should never take the word of a dedicated Woody Allen apologist at face value, particularly given our clockwork-like tendency to proclaim "Woody is back to form!" every three years (in 2008, Vicky Cristina Barcelona ; in 2005, Match Point ; in 2002, Hollywood Ending so it's not a perfect fit, but you get what I'm driving at).
Some will find themselves bored within the first three minutes, which is composed entirely of beautiful images of Paris, but that is part of the enchanting appeal of this film - Allen wants you to love Paris as much as Gil does and wants to show you the magic, the romance and the spark the city holds for him, much as Allen did with the cities of Spain in 2008's Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
As was the case with Penélope Cruz in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," Woody Allen brings out, for the first time in an American film, the fire and allure Cotillard has shown in her European work.