Reviews edited by Mark Adams
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REVIEWS
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Midnight In Paris BY MARK ADAMS
Woody Allen’s lush and charming Midnight In Paris is an amusing and elegantly constructed love letter to Paris, rich on romance, humour and cul- ture, and driven by a nicely pitched performance by Owen Wilson as a would-be writer in love with the city and its cultural past. Its breezy and accessible structure, easy laughs
and healthy mainstream cast should help the film secure strong box office and generally positive reviews, and it looks likely to be one of Allen’s stronger performers. On a certain level, it is a familiar Allen concoction of smart, urbane laughs which lacks real intellectual depth, but Midnight In Paris delivers easy warmth and is a sweetly engaging Cannes opening-night film. Allen has gone on record stating he considers
Paris as the equal to New York as the greatest city in the world (despite flirting with London and Barcelona in recent films), and certainly the opening scenes of Midnight In Paris are reminis- cent of Allen’s 1978 classic Manhattan, with its lush montage of shots of Paris in sunshine and rain set against a jazz classic. Hollywood screenwriter Gil (Wilson) is on holi-
day in the French capital with his fiancée Inez (McAdams) and her wealthy parents (Fuller and Kennedy), who are grudgingly in the city for her father to seal a business deal. They make no bones in their dismissal of Gil, who is fretting about the
n 20 Screen International at the Cannes Film FestivalMay 12, 2011
OPENING NIGHT OUT OF COMPETITION
US-Sp. 2011. 94mins Director/screenplay Woody Allen Production companies Mediapro, Versatil Cinema, Gravier Productions, Pontchartrain US distribution Sony Classics International sales Imagina, www.
imaginasales.tv Producers Letty Aronson, Jaume Roures, Stephen Tenenbaum Executive producer Javier Mendez Co-producers Helen Robin, Raphael Benoliel Cinematography Darius Khondji Editor Alisa Lepselter Main cast Owen Wilson, Marion Cotillard, Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Tom Hiddleston, Alison Pill, Kurt Fuller, Mimi Kennedy, Nina Arianda, Corey Stoll
novel he is writing and absorbed with Paris’ cul- tural past. Inez is less enthused about Paris — espe- cially when Gil talks about giving up his screenwriting and moving there to finish his novel — but is cheered up when they bump into intellec- tual Paul (Sheen) and his wife Carol (Arianda). Gil sees the pompous Paul as an annoying
stuffed-shirt, and starts doing all he can to avoid spending time with them all. After an evening’s wine-tasting (Paul is also apparently an expert on French wine) Gil leaves them when they all go dancing and wanders around Paris, slightly drunk. As the clock strikes midnight, a vintage car
drives up to Gil and the drunken occupants pull him into the vehicle and take him off to party. To his bemusement, Gil finds he has gently drawn back in time and finds himself in conversation with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Hiddleston and Pill), listening to Cole Porter play the piano and chatting to Ernest Hemingway (Stoll). From then on, Gil uses the excuse of late-night
Parisian walks to re-enter this wonderful world populated with his favourite literary and cultural figures. Gertrude Stein (Bates) offers to read his manuscript, and while at her flat he meets the beautiful Adriana (Cotillard), who has been the lover and muse to a series of artists (including Picasso, Modigliani and Braque). In another amusingly charming interlude, after
he and Adriana have wandered the city, he has a drink with Salvador Dali (Brody, in a cameo), film- maker Luis Bunuel and photographer Man Ray. Gil finally plucks up courage to declare his love for Adriana, though to his — and her — surprise,
they are approached by a horse-drawn landau and find themselves in Paris of the Belle Epoque (Adri- ana’s dream cultural era) and mingling with Tou- louse-Lautrec, Gauguin and Degas. Allen’s film is very much about romantic attach-
ments to a different era — and how the past always seems much more exciting than the moment one lives in — which allows for plenty of smartly writ- ten scenes. It becomes a little wearing as Gil bumps into one famous figure after another. But Allen has a smart wit, and keeps things nicely paced and amusing, and in Wilson has found someone at ease with his flowing dialogue, even delivering the usual Allen lines about fear of death with genial ease. Marion Cotillard looks terrific, though is given
little to do apart from act the romantic muse to the mildly neurotic Gil, while the ever-excellent Rachel McAdams (who starred alongside Wilson in The Wedding Crashers) gets some of the best lines and adds a contemporary sex appeal. Michael Sheen nails the intellectual pedant role
with ease — he is an easy mixture of smarm and charm — and has a nice scene where he argues with a tour guide (France’s first lady, Carla Bruni) at the Rodin Museum about Rodin’s wife, while also impressive (and building his reputation nicely) is Tom Hiddleston as Scott Fitzgerald. To a certain degree, the film is the perfect
Woody Allen rom-com concoction (and in truth would have worked just as easily as a concept in New York), while the strong cast and lovely loca- tions could help it appeal to audiences who might not be Woody regulars.
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