Midnight in Paris – review

The souffle rises as it has not done for many years in Woody Allen's new film Midnight in Paris, which (incredibly) is already the most commercially successful of his career. It's a funny, slight comedy whose time-travel conceit is managed effortlessly; there's something of Allen's 1985 movie The Purple Rose of Cairo as well as his 1977 short story The Kugelmass Episode, about the guy who enters the world of Madame Bovary. Allen is famously a film-maker who has outlived his heyday, and whose continuing output seems uneasy and dated in the 21st century. So perhaps it's the fantasy-nostalgist theme of this movie, the retreat from the present day, that has restored his mojo. In the present, the film clunks a bit. But in the past, it zips along.

The modern setting is luxury-tourist Paris, five-star hotel Paris, the Paris routinely available to wealthy and middle-aged visitors, and the film begins with a montage tribute of picture-postcard images to Allen's trad-jazz score; it's weirdly like the one that began Manhattan, though without the voiceover and it's unmistakably the work of an outsider. (It's possible that Allen has seen the brisker, shrewder Paris streetscape montage that begins Mia Hansen-Løve's movie Father of My Children. Perhaps someone will now do a YouTube mashup of banlieue scenes from La Haine to Allen's clarinet.)

Owen Wilson takes the proxy-Woody role as Gil, a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter who comes on a tense trip to Paris with his gorgeous fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents. Idolising the bohemian Paris of the 1920s, Gil finds that the city has revived his dormant longing to be a serious novelist. One night, while strolling alone in the city, Gil sees a mysterious antique vehicle roll up and its champagne-swilling occupants urge him to jump in. He travels back in time with them to a party where he encounters F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Cole Porter – and falls in love with Picasso's mistress, played by Marion Cotillard.

Wilson plays it exactly right: bemused, excited, throwaway, and Cotillard has delicacy and charm. There are real laughs, witty touches galore, beguiling cameos – and the film is actually about something. When the action returns to the present, the fizz declines, and I have to say the final, crucial confrontation between Gil and Inez doesn't work. But for simple pleasure, the sort of reliably stimulating pleasure Allen used to deliver all the time, that confectionery of sophisticated wit … Midnight in Paris does well. This may not be a return to the glory days, but it's a vivid reminder of them. That's almost as good.