Woody Allen’s latest European excursion, Midnight in Paris, was a surprise art house hit at the American box office, grossing more than $50 million. It combines two aspects of his post-Manhattan work that have found favour with audiences. First, it offers a tourist’s appreciation of the city where the action is set – the trick paid off in his 2008 success, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Second, it is a comic nostalgic fantasy in the vein of The Purple Rose of Cairo. There are actual jokes.
The plot relies partly for its effect on not anticipating a major twist. All you need to know is that it concerns an anxious (naturally) screenwriter, Gil (Owen Wilson) who is vacationing in Paris with his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams). Inez’s parents share an adjacent room and an old acquaintance (Michael Sheen) imposes his pedantic views on their company. In an attempt to avoid a dull evening, Gil wanders into the night. He gets lost on the right bank of the Seine. A clock chimes midnight and a vehicle pulls up. Gil encounters a group of Americans with whom he would rather hang out.
The movie allows Allen to exercise his predilection for pastiche, marshalling an impressive supporting cast, including Marion Cotillard, Kathy Bates and Adrien Brody. Allen rolls out his usual tics – an anti-intellectual bias, the writer who wants to move onto something serious, but is really writing about his relationship, and the free spirit – actually there are two here, one played by Cotillard, the other a bookseller played by Lea Seydoux – who helps to set him free. Yet it ambles on agreeably. France’s First Lady Carla Bruni’s tiny role as a tour guide contributes in a minor way to the pleasure of the film.
Allen’s dialogue doesn’t exactly excite the ear and he has a leading man, Wilson, who, like Allen himself, doesn’t appear to exert much effort. Still, the subject does appear to have stimulated Allen’s imagination and you sense this is a film he might have enjoyed conceiving rather than an excuse to eat tomato sandwiches in a European metropolis – an anecdote from Hayley Atwell, who worked with him on 2007’s Cassandra’s Dream.
The film is a predictably benign portrait of man’s aesthetic achievements. It did less well in France, perhaps because people were bemused by a film set in their capital city somewhat devoid of real Parisians. This is nothing new, since whole ethnic groups are missing from the majority of Allen’s New York-set movies. On a deeper level, it represents further avoidance of contemporary concerns on the part of its director. Allen’s work, post 1979, does not aspire to greatness. There is something wrong about being lectured by a director who does not try as hard as he once did, even if the movie is as gentle-natured as this one.
The movie adaptation of David Nicholls’ bestseller, One Day, begins in 1988 with a group of students from Edinburgh University celebrating their graduation late into the night still wearing their caps and gowns. I don’t know any graduates who actually purchased their gowns – they were rented only on graduation day and had to be returned by 5pm to get the deposit back. I understand why director Lone Scherfig resorted to such a pictorial shortcut. However, it undermines any sense of realism.
The opening is the least of the film’s shortcomings. Chief among these are the film’s stars, Jim Sturgess and Anne Hathaway. Sturgess plays Dex, a wealthy student who ends up drunkenly accompanying Emma (Hathaway) back to her flat. We get little sense of how well they know one another prior to this. However, Sturgess, who is actually supposed to be playing a man in thrall to alcohol for much of the movie, doesn’t really do inebriated. As for his co-star, the credits list security for Anne Hathaway. I assume they were employed to prevent anyone criticising her lapses in accent. The changes in her Yorkshire lilt are so erratic that I can only conclude that the producers told her to tone it down.
Both Hathaway and Sturgess play the same characters over two decades. Dex and Emma don’t have sex that first night. The next time we see them, Dex is helping her move. It’s July 15 , one year on, and as the novel’s fans know, the story shows a snap shot of their lives on successive St Swithin’s Days. The day is the anniversary of near-intimacy, and it assumes increasing significance as the film trundles on.
The structure allows Nicholls to meditate on celebrity. Dex becomes a late-night chat show host. Emma works as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant, then a teacher before finally becoming a best-selling children’s author. Dex’s success is short-lived andturgess is unconvincing as the laddish man of popular culture. The film is so mid-Atlantic that there is only the merest hint that Dex does drugs. He is likeable only when he has his clothes stolen while skinny-dipping. He ends up married – not to Emma – and with a child until his wife (Romola Garai) humiliates him. At this point, Dex and Emma finally give in to their true feelings.
You can see why the book is so popular, and the structure is intriguing. However, the film is so devoid of right notes that you would actually welcome a remake.
