The Romantic Sentiment: Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris

Paris allows you various freedoms other cities do not, though these can come at a price. For the sensual Henry Miller, the city had a whorish quality to it that suggested ravishing beauty at a distance and a feeling of disgust on embracing it. ‘You feel tricked,’ he lamented. New York, on the other hand, was barely that, far from a luscious body, however disgusting on close-up, but ‘cold, glittering, malign.’

The artist gravitates to the Parisian salons and seedy haunts like desperate moths to burning lights. Woody Allen, through Gil (Owen Wilson) is no exception in pursuing this worn theme in his latest love affair with a city. But there are times when a cliché is something of a divine gift. From New York, to London, and now, Paris, Allen’s indulgence is growing. Rome promises to be next.

Gil is a Hollywood screenwriting hack who is hoping to drag out the defining novel out of the creative bowels of Paris, besieged by a fiancée (Rachel Adams) more inclined to worry about furniture purchases for a home once they get married and the gallivanting of her insufferable friends.

Gil (Allen in an earlier life, only without the comedic calisthenics?) embarks on a midnight stroll after a heady wine tasting, and finds himself lost. No matter, he chances upon an antique roadster of the 1920s, and finds himself in the pantheon of cultural greatness. The guests, bathed in that light resembling a cricket day-night match, are all celebrities of the period. Francis Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston) socializes avidly; Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) is aptly captured with his musings on visceral violence, grace under fire and love; Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) is formidable and encouraging.

Gil is in his element, and returns constantly to the 1920s while his relationship crumbles. He meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard) and love duly sweetens the scene. Adriana, however, would like to have her own retreat from her dull times: to the Belle Époque of the 1890s.

Critics have been quick to point out Allen’s temptation to self-plagiarise, picking from his treasure trove of previous experiments. His effort at time-travel and fantastic escapism are alluded to in his short story ‘The Kugelmass Episode’ (1977), in which the world of Madame Bovary is the central subject of study, and the film The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), when film and reality meet across the cinema seats.

Allen’s own celebrity and pull is such that he can get the first lady of France to be a tolerant tour guide at the Musée Rodin, and academy award winner Adrien Brody to play an enthusiastic Salvador Dalí. It was, in many ways, the perfect opener to Cannes this year.

The past is tasty and colorful when the present grinds one into the desperation that reality provides. But romantics do find romantics (witness the meeting between Gil and a Parisian woman who shares his love of Cole Porter), and Allan’s overdone sweetness ensures that his audience leave satisfied, even in the present.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.

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