Midnight In Paris

I've only ever seen a handful of Woody Allen films; Annie Hall, Bullets Over Broadway and Manhattan are my favourites whereas the last one I saw was Match Point which I thought was weak. Every year when a Woody Allen film is released, there is always a critic which declares that 'this is a return to form for Woody Allen'. Until now, I didn't believe them...

The start of the film appears to have been sponsored by the Paris Tourist Board, with what feels like a never ending montage of all the things to see in Paris. Thankfully the film moves on from that to a group of Americans who are in Paris for business. They consist of Gil (Owen Wilson), his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her parents. Gil is a Hollywood scriptwriter, who is trying to break out of that world by writing a novel. Unfortunately he is struggling and hopes that being in Paris (a city that he truly loves) will help him complete his novel.

Gil and Inez are, on the surface, a happy, successful couple; scratch the surface and you quickly realise that they want very different things in life. Gil wants to leave his lucrative job and move to Paris to write, Inez wants to move to Malibu and emulate her conservative parent's way of living. Their situation isn't helped by the arrival of Inez's friends Paul (Michael Sheen) and his wife Carol (Nina Ariandra) who truly are a coupley couple. Paul is a real 'know-it-all' and Inez appears more impressed with him rather than with her fiancee.

Searching for inspiration, Gil starts to walk the streets of Paris at night (something his fiancee and her parents fail to understand), and starts to go back to the 1920's and meets the writers that he so admires. As with these types of films, there is a love interest and lots of backwards and forwards in time.

The film is frothy, entertaining and fun; it is all about nostalgia and how each generation looks to a previous era as the 'golden age'. The film is very frank about the message that it is conveying which is that nostalgia is just a  denial of the present.

Now, I want to say that Wilson was great, and he is certainly well-cast in the role of Gil, however there is something about his voice which grates on me and it seems to be more obvious in this film than in his others. As he is in the vast majority of the scenes, I couldn't get away from his incredibly slow, almost indifferent style of speaking. However, all of the other performances were great. A special mention should be made of Adrien Brody for a fantastically hilarious take on Salvador Dali - truly inspired stuff.

Verdict: A beautifully shot film, with lots of laugh out loud moments and some excellent performances. The music score is gorgeous and the film was on the right side of gentle fantasy. However, Wilson's voice did prove very distracting. Despite this, it really is a return to form for Mr Allen...