Midnight in Paris, ditected by Woody Allen

Midnight in Paris is the hour of dreams. Woody Allen's latest film is the renewed ascending curve of an outstanding career with fewer downs than ups.
Back to the splendour of his earlier films, such as Radio Days or Manhattan, Allen did not put all his bets on a lesser remake of a proved success. Midnight in Paris is an original approach of an unprejudiced director.

A Man is engaged to be married and goes to Paris, with his fiancée. If Paris is the city of love and fascination, it is also the city of truth, the place where one encounters oneself, and becomes out of love with the wrong person. But in this surrealist film, love is merely a scenery for bold, yet tastefully discrete, magic events. Gil is a man who believes the age of gold to be in the past and never in the present or the future. He walks about nostalgia shops, and dreams of the twenties. Lost in an alley and sleepless, alone and bored with his constantly present pseudo-intellectual fiancée’s friend, he is suddenly taken in an old taxi, at the strike of midnight, to the real twenties where he meets his greatest idols: Cole Porter, Jean Cocteau, Buñuel, Man Ray, Picasso, Dali, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway… and Adriana. Every night he stands in the same alley and every time he enters a parallel universe. He falls in love with his twenties female similar, a woman for whom the golden age was the last decade of the nineteenth century. And here, the story jumps into a farer past, the Paris of Lautrec, Degas, Gauguin, Offenbach.

The stroke of genius of the director is far from the common final revelation that makes one return to real life. No, the only revelation is the fact that Gil overcomes his fixation through Adriana choices and actions. She chooses to stay in the nineteenth century stating that the past is the place to be, whilst he realizes that each person belongs to their own time.

Unlike The Purple Rose of Cairo, where the main character accepts the ugliness of reality after leaving the universe of dreams, Gil sees the beauty of it for the first time, as he crosses a bridge, side by side to his soul mate, a French girl who, like him, loves to walk in the rain.

Let’s do it, let’s fall in love, by Cole Porter is the main musical theme, and does the job marvellously.
A note should be made to a less achieved filming of present Paris. Being himself a lover of the old days, Woody Allen captures the light of Paris past as it is represented in paintings. But he fails to grasp the essence of real Parisian light, or even Spain’s (Vicky, Christina, Barcelona). Though living in Europe, Woody Allen is heartedly American, he shoots New York with brilliancy, but hardly the rest of the world.

Yet, once again, regardless of his passion for the old, Woody Allen answers with the future, when the Present asks a question.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atLg2wQQxvU

Cast and crew

Woody Allen’s long time searched alter-ego, Owen Wilson plays Gil in the main role.
Other roles: Yves Heck as Cole Porter, Adrian Brody as Dali, Corey Stoll as Hemingway, Allison Pill and Tom Hiddleston as Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marcial Di Fonzo Bo as Picasso, Tom Cordier as Man Ray, Adrien de Van as Buñuel, François Rostain as Degas, Marion Cottillard as Adriana, Rachel McAdams as Inez (Gil’s fiancée), Michael Sheen as Paul (Inez pseudo-intellectual friend), Léa Seydoux as Gabrielle (Gil’s true love)…
Director: Woody Allen
Written by Woody Allen