MIDNIGHT IN PARIS

We all know Woody Allen loves New York – his enormous back catalogue of films set in the Big Apple is testament to that. But Midnight in Paris is his love letter to the French capital, a city of which he is equally enamoured. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a hack Hollywood screenwriter visiting Paris with fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). To Gil, the City of Light is swelling with beauty and artistic promise, and he dreams of abandoning his lucrative job to move there and write novels, the way his literary heroes, Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, did in the golden age of the 1920s. Midnight in Paris poses the question: are the ages of the past any more golden than the present? To say more would be to spoil the delicious surprise – the less you know beforehand, the better. But this film cannot fail to charm you, even if you know the twist, and it firmly cements Allen’s place as the master of his art form. The belle époque had Toulouse-Lautrec. The 1920s had Hemingway. We have Allen. (KS) *****