Film Review | Midnight in Paris

At the end of the day, we all live in our heads. It's not just the artists, poets and philosophers among us who have any special claim on the inner workings of the mind - whatever your profession or inclination, you're going to see the world through your own lens, and at the very best, you can meet your fellow humans just about half way.

Woody Allen's latest film, a romantic comedy set in a heavily, unashamedly romanticised Paris, grabs this idea and takes it to its fluffiest conclusion.

Allen is growing too old to play the protagonists he used to embody so well, but the seasoned writer-director seems to have found a more-than-able replacement in Owen Wilson - the sometimes troubled, dirty blonde actor here plays Gil Pender, a Hollywood screenwriter engaged to the beautiful but somewhat superficial Inez (Rachel McAdams), who is growing tired of her fiance's flaky aspirations to write a novel and would rather he just stick his (famously crooked) nose firmly into his lucrative Hollywood career.

When the couple visit Paris, Gil hopes that his dream city will turn out to be just the tonic he needs to get his creative juices flowing. During a midnight stroll through the Parisian streets, after declining an offer to join his wife for a party with friends, Gil is met by a car that seems to be from a different time and, hopping aboard, is transported to Paris in the 20s, where the city was populated by some of the key figures of the European artistic and intellectual elite.

Baffled and overjoyed in equal measure, Gil parties with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddlstone and Alison Pill) and accepts sombre life advice from Earnest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) and feedback on his novel from Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates).

But things get further entangled when, during one of his midnight time-travelling sessions, Gil falls for 'artistic groupie' and sometime lover of Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo Bo), Adriana (Marion Cotillard).

Woody Allen's output is often hit-and-miss - really, he's too prolific for it to be otherwise - but many have heralded Midnight in Paris to be a return to form, and it's easy to see why. The fantastical plot is effortlessly spun out - there is no energy spent on explaining or justifying the flights of fancy, so that both Allen and the audience are left to indulge in the nostalgia the protagonist is guilty of, and to revel in a past we acknowledge as cliché but that we can't help but fall in love with again and again.

(Pill - the surly drummer from indie comic bonanza Scott Pilgrim vs. The World - as Zelda and Adrien Brody as Salvador Dali are particularly delightful, and might even inspire re-watches... and as if to complete the cavalcade of Parisian clichés, first lady Carla Bruni also makes an appearance as a tour guide.)

There is nothing deep about the film - save for an inevitable if somewhat tacked-on idea about the dangers of wallowing in nostalgia - but in a way that is its greatest merit - Allen's vision is self-contained and complete, hitting on pleasure points with a veteran's precision and wearing its heart firmly on its sleeve.

One can hope that Allen sticks to Owen Wilson as a stand-in for future films. The 43-year-old actor, having proven himself on more than one occasion as being able to walk the line between both mainstream and independent comedy, might have finally found a perfect fit in Allen's perennially witty (if occasionally flawed), skittish wit.