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Midnight in Paris – review
Production year
2011
Countries
USA, Spain
Director
Woody Allen
Casts
Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Corey Stall, Kathy Bates
Woody Allen sends us very beautiful, slightly ironic postcard from Paris in the 1920ies and he writes it very good.
Right at the start I have to admit, that I have not seen any film directed by Woody Allen before, so I will not give any references to his other works, but I have seen a lot of movies with Owen Wilson and even though I do not like all of these movies, I always liked the way Wilson portrayed his characters. Whereas his roles mostly are funny guys who have some problems with women, this one is different. Wilson got the chance to diversify his own portfolio and proved that he can do more than being an actor for light entertainment.
The film starts out with some beautiful impressions of Paris. Each sequence could also be on a postcard, which built up our image of the french capital. These impressions are embedded in gently jazz music and the first few words give the viewers all the information they need about the main character, Gil. He is very romantic, loves Paris, especially in the rain and dreams often of the glory days in the 1920s.
Gil is a Hollywood scriptwriter who visits Paris with his fiancée Inez according to a business trip of her father. One evening, after a wine tasting event, Gil does not like to go out with a group of intellectuals and goes for a walk through the streets of Paris instead. When he sits down on some stairs suddenly an ancient car comes as the midnight strikes and the bizarre people in there ask him to join them and through this he gets back in the 1920s.
This is the first of several times Gil travels back in time, where he meets a lot of famous writers and painters and tries to learn from them and discuss his own novel. However, while he gets many of new ideas and perspectives, he also gets a lot of problems in real life…
I really loved the way Allen staged the trips in earlier days. The fluently transition in the past with a vehicle from the past time attended by a significant music makes it easy for the viewers to follow the plot. The dialogs with the artists of this time like Picasso, Hemmingway or Dali are very interesting because they animate to think about our thoughts about nostalgic times and why we often think they were better than the present or about the things we interpret in the works of these former artists. The most fascinating for me is how Allen produces a romantic comedy in which the focus is not on the love between two human but rather the love to a city and its glory days.
Production year
2011
Countries
USA, Spain
Director
Woody Allen
Casts
Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Corey Stall, Kathy Bates
Woody Allen sends us very beautiful, slightly ironic postcard from Paris in the 1920ies and he writes it very good.
Right at the start I have to admit, that I have not seen any film directed by Woody Allen before, so I will not give any references to his other works, but I have seen a lot of movies with Owen Wilson and even though I do not like all of these movies, I always liked the way Wilson portrayed his characters. Whereas his roles mostly are funny guys who have some problems with women, this one is different. Wilson got the chance to diversify his own portfolio and proved that he can do more than being an actor for light entertainment.
The film starts out with some beautiful impressions of Paris. Each sequence could also be on a postcard, which built up our image of the french capital. These impressions are embedded in gently jazz music and the first few words give the viewers all the information they need about the main character, Gil. He is very romantic, loves Paris, especially in the rain and dreams often of the glory days in the 1920s.
Gil is a Hollywood scriptwriter who visits Paris with his fiancée Inez according to a business trip of her father. One evening, after a wine tasting event, Gil does not like to go out with a group of intellectuals and goes for a walk through the streets of Paris instead. When he sits down on some stairs suddenly an ancient car comes as the midnight strikes and the bizarre people in there ask him to join them and through this he gets back in the 1920s.
This is the first of several times Gil travels back in time, where he meets a lot of famous writers and painters and tries to learn from them and discuss his own novel. However, while he gets many of new ideas and perspectives, he also gets a lot of problems in real life…
I really loved the way Allen staged the trips in earlier days. The fluently transition in the past with a vehicle from the past time attended by a significant music makes it easy for the viewers to follow the plot. The dialogs with the artists of this time like Picasso, Hemmingway or Dali are very interesting because they animate to think about our thoughts about nostalgic times and why we often think they were better than the present or about the things we interpret in the works of these former artists. The most fascinating for me is how Allen produces a romantic comedy in which the focus is not on the love between two human but rather the love to a city and its glory days.
