Title: Midnight in Paris.Year: 2011.Duration: 100 min.Genre: Romantic comedy.Cast: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Carla Bruni.Written and directed by Woody Allen. In the latest movie of the American director Woody Allen, Paris is the setting of an incredible love story, where the past seems so much more vivid. Gil (Owen Wilson) is a Hollywood screenwriter who thinks that the past was better. For him the golden times were the 20’s, when people heard Cole Porter’s music, and Paris was the place where artists met. These were artists such as Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Hemingway or Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. On his trip to Paris he reinforces his idea of quitting his job and starting a career as a book writer, an idea that his fiancee doesn’t like. She is a beautiful American woman, from a wealthy family, that doesn’t share his romanticism and instead dreams to live in a Hollywood mansion. The turning point of the story comes when, one night, Gil decides to take a walk through Paris. Since that day an antique car will appear past midnight to take Gil to the 20’s making his dream come true. In his journeys through time he will meet a couple, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who are American novelists and assist to a party where Cole Porter is playing the piano and singing alive. He also will have the chance to hand out the draft of his first novel to Hemingway, and discuss with him his work. Gil will meet Pablo Picasso, as well, and will have the privilege to take a verre de vin (glass of wine) in the company of the surrealists Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel and Man Ray. Traveling through time makes him more romantic and melancholic about the past. In his visits to the cafes and parties of the 20’s, Gils falls in love with a young pretty French lady. This romantic story will make him think about his relationship with his fiancée. As all the movies of Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris is a marvelous romantic comedy in which the impossible comes true. As it is tradition in Allen’s stories, this is a movie for lovers, traitors, dreamers, romantics, and idealists that simply like Paris in the rain, best, as Gil does. “It is marvelously romantic, even though — or precisely because — it acknowledges the disappointment that shadows every genuine expression of romanticism”: The New York Times. “Midnight in Paris is infused with seductive secrets no review should spoil. But for all the film’s bracing humor and ravishing romance, there are also haunting shadows. That alone makes it a keeper”: Rolling Stone. Ends
