The camera, in the hands of a lover, sweeps Paris
What will he
think of next? The next this time is the inspired structure of Woody Allen's
Midnight in Paris that allows Allen, as writer, to visit a past era he
loves. In an interview in Cannes where this film opened the festival, Allen was
questioned about his repeated use of the familiar tourist spots and literary
icons of 1920s Paris. He replied that in his movies about New York and Paris, he
films the places he has seen and loved in movies. These cities of his
imagination become the landscapes of his films.
In a grand
introduction, the camera, in the hands of a lover, sweeps Paris in the morning
light, at noon, at dusk, in sunshine and rain, and finally in the lights of the
night. In an instant, we know just what he meant in the interview. He is filming
the magic of the images stored over the years in his memory bank of the Paris he
knows from the movies. But look what he does with it.
Allen, as
director, immediately trains his camera on favorite targets: The Ugly American
Family utterly without redeeming features and their friend, the pedantic bore.
Mother and daughter have the hard edges and dyed platinum hair of the
acquisitive New Yorker. They are here to shop. Along for the ride is Inez's
fiancé Gil Burton (Owen Wilson), a screenwriter disgusted with his craft,
wanting to write a novel, and in love not with Inez (Rachel McAdams) but with
the Paris of his imagination. Here is Woody Allen filming his alter ego
wandering alone through Paris until, on one glorious night, as the clock strikes
twelve, a yellow taxi full of revelers appears and invites Gil aboard.
The cab
carries Gil through time to his Golden Era where he wanders, awestruck, among
its luminaries - Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein, Toklas, Cole Porter, Dali, Sylvia
Beach's bookstore. He has a delicate and lovely time with Adriana (a perfect
Marion Cotillard ), and a Parisian tour guide played well by Carla Bruni who in
her other life is France's First Lady. Back in his real time, Gil finds a diary
in a kiosk where Adriana had once written of wandering through Paris with a
young American writer.
Allen paints
his Americans in the harshest of colors and imagines the French in soft, loving
tones. If he uses too many visual exclamation points to emphasize the obvious,
we are still in thrall to a nerdy young American and his lovely new French
girlfriend wandering the streets of an earlier time. As we watch Owen Wilson, in
hip slung khakis and plaid shirt as the naïve American, we know that after four
decades of watching Woody Allen films, we in the audience have begun to see
Allen himself through a lens of nostalgia. We smile at the fact that his
characters are endearingly recognizable. The characters, Allen, and the audience
are sliding magically through his imagining of Paris. It's delectable, nothing
less.
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