Midnight in Paris

My love affair with Woody Allen started in France. I was working and living in a school in Lyon, and happened across a whole shelf of his films in a municipal library (in France, slightly confusingly, films are ordered by director rather than title). The "early, funny" likes of Sleeper and Bananas are a bit zany for me, but there are eight works that have dated particularly well: Love and Death (1975) is a glorious, visually ravishing double-parody of Russian literature and stark Scandinavian cinema; Annie Hall (1977) is the Ulysses of romantic comedy; Manhattan (1979) is a strange, artful, fraught poem about New York with one of the most moving break-up scenes of all time; Stardust Memories (1980) is a Fellini-esque disquisition on the beauty and hypocrisy of cinema; Hannah and her Sisters (1984) is a terrific ensemble dramedy lifted by a Richard Yatesian understanding of womanhood; Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) is an operatic, Schubert-infused anti-parable in which the purest comedy and the purest tragedy seep into each other, and is probably the best film he's made; Husbands and Wives (1992), which he made during his much-publicised split from Mia Farrow, is a harsh, Cassavetesian, emotionally dense study of middle-aged stasis and the temptations that surround it; and Sweet and Lowdown (1999) is a masterful ballad about male solitude, featuring a peach of a performance from Sean Penn, and remains Allen's last great film.

Some would say Allen lost his magic touch before then, some would say he re-discovered it with Match Point or Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Both are perfectly decent films, neither as dire nor as triumphant as most critics claimed. Some of the English characters' dialogue in Match Point is woefully, laughably off-the-mark, and much of Vicky Cristina Barcelona is left in the oven a little too long (it still baffles me that Penelope Cruz' performance was more acclaimed than Rebecca Hall's). But as critical doyen Peter Bradshaw once observed, Woody Allen's recent films only disappoint if you compare them to other Woody Allen films: compared to contemporary romantic thrillers or dramas, they actually stand up rather well.

And so to Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson plays a very successful Hollywood scriptwriter who visits Paris with his fiancée, Rachel McAdams, in the hope the city will enrich the novel he is attempting to write. While she flirts with bearded Francophile know-it-all Michael Sheen, Wilson wanders the rain-washed streets and, on the stroke of midnight one evening, catches a chance lift with a group of dapper revellers. All of a sudden, he is transported to the literary jetset of the Twenties and is soon swilling champagne with F. Scott Fitzgerald, receiving life advice from Hemingway, and hobnobbing with Picasso, Dali, Bunuel, Gertrude Stein and a rather sexy muse, played by Marion Cotillard. She and Wilson are kindred nostalgic spirits, and she more than anyone tempts him away from his life in the present day.

It is a sweet, optimistic, surprisingly sensible film. The present-day scenes, perhaps deliberately, are a tad stale: McAdams has a damp squib of a part, her parents are awful, and Michael Sheen's smart alec isn't as funny as he should be (Wilson's intellectual victory over Sheen in front of the Picasso is disappointingly predictable). However, as soon as we go back in time, the film finds its rhythm. In the same way the film begins with an overlong postcard slideshow of Paris (a simpler, less ironic companion to the start of Manhattan), the checklist of obligatory big names does start to irk after a while ('Oh look, there's Luis'; 'We're going to Gertrude's house'). But who cares? They're great company, especially Tom Hiddleston's classy, gregarious Scott Fitzgerald and Kathy Bates' spikily supportive Gertrude Stein, although Corey Stoll's Hemingway steals the show. He is a revelation, a bruisingly charismatic purveyor of crystalline wisdom, addled with booze and political ideals. He speaks as he writes: terse, forceful, more affected than he lets on.

My favourite scene, and one on which the film unexpectedly twists, is when Owen and Marion go back to the Belle Epoque and meet Degas et al. It is a subtle, beautifully observed defence of the contemporary, ignored by Cotillard but heeded by Wilson. Perhaps we Woody Allen nostalgists should stop pining for the old days and appreciate this late European phase for what it is (given the film's made over $115 million worldwide, perhaps people already do). Midnight in Paris is not a masterpiece, it is not hilarious, and it doesn't break a great deal of ground. But it is very easy viewing, brings to life a fascinating artistic milieu, and offers a cosy, escapist reflection on escapism.