“I'm having trouble because I'm a Hollywood hack who never gave real literature a shot!” So says Gil (Owen Wilson), a Hollywood hack who has yet to give literature a real shot. He’s in Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents. They’re die-hard Republicans, they think he’s a communist. He wants to write a novel, she wants to go shopping. Inez meets a self-important ex-boyfriend who’s holidaying in France. Gil discovers the golden age, literally. It’s midnight on the steps of the Sacre Coeur, a dark carriage appears and takes him back to Paris of the 1920’s; an age of artistic might that runs with men like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Cole Porter and Ernest Hemmingway, women like Gertrude Stein and Adriana. Gil takes a shine to Adriana, and finds his muse.

So begins this perfectly delightful romantic comedy that recalls the best of Allen neatly packaged with the simple idea of fences and greener grass. Europe has been good to Allen, reinvigorating both his dramatic and comedic career. And everyone wants a slice of the magic: Marion Cottillard, Kathy Bates, Adrian Brody and Michael Sheen among them. Unassuming by his standards, Wilson is a charmingly excitable solid point about which others orbit in a strange and unlikely world. While familiar motifs appear – women, infidelity, neuroses – Allen makes it all as light and crisp as a fresh crepe.

When the comic planets align, as with The Purple Rose Of Cairo or Bullets Over Broadway, everyone, cast and audience, gets to have a great time. Midnight In Paris is undeniably slight but is enormous fun. Where else would Luis Bunuel, Man Ray and Salvador Dali share screen time with a modern American writer? As Gil’s desire to discover his inner self takes him further and further from the woman he’s intended to marry, it opens a crazed space where he finds perspective, and Toulouse-Lautrec. If only all Parisian holidays were like this.

// COLIN FRASER
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