Director: Woody Allen; starring: Owen Wilson, Michael Sheen, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Marion Cotillard. Rating: * *
The 64th Cannes Film Festival has begun with a soft landing. Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, screening out of competition, is the latest dispatch from the Grand Tour of Europe that the American director, who claims to have been priced out of the States, has been sending in recent years. Even more than in Everyone Says I Love You, it’s a valentine of the camembert kind, a nostalgic wonderland that offers up a picture-postcard version of the city (Look! The Eiffel Tower! The Louvre! The Champs Elysees!) whiter than the national team of the French football federation’s dreams. It’s also Allen’s best film since Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Californian hack who churns out screenplays but dreams of writing a novel. He and his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) have come to Paris to sigh dreamily as they wander its boulevards and the banks of the Seine. The trouble is that Inez’s Tea Party-supporting parents are with them. Another problem is that Inez prefers to spend her time in the company of her college crush Paul (Michael Sheen), a pompous visiting academic who’s in town to deliver a lecture at the Sorbonne.
The film wanders from romantic comedy into time-travel territory when Gil winds up one night at a party where he meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They drink, talk about art, and are happy to hoof it up. They represent the Paris he wants, and although at first he’s confused about whether they’re real, he goes along for the ride, having fun with Bunuel, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) and Picasso, as well as falling for Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a would-be fashion designer and artist’s muse.
Midnight In Paris is Celebrity Stars In Their Eyes for cultural snobs. Some of its conceits are funny — Hemingway, pumped-up and testy, asks Gil: “Have you ever shot a charging lion?” - and the what-ifs, as in all conjectural comedies, are pleasing. But a strong cast — including Adrien Brody as a rhinoceros-fixated Dali — is wasted in the rush to pack the film with as many big-name actors and characters as possible (not forgetting a wooden Carla Bruni, playing a museum guide), so that it devolves into a sweaty, over-crowded cocktail party.
As a meditation about the allure but also the possible dangers of thinking the past was better than the future it’s far too ponderous. Still, it’s not wholly terrible, and that’s not something you can say about Allen’s films very often these days.
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