Psycho's Movie Reviews #26: Midnight In Paris (2011)

Midnight in Paris is a 2011 fantasy comedy film written and directed by Woody Allen. Set in Paris, the film follows Gil Pender, a screenwriter, who is forced to confront the shortcomings of his relationship with his materialistic fiancée and their divergent goals, which become increasingly exaggerated as he travels back in time each night at midnight.

Produced by the Spanish group Mediapro and Allen's US-based Gravier Productions, the film stars Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni, Tom Hiddleston, Marion Cotillard, and Michael Sheen. It premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was released in the United States on May 20, 2011. The film opened to critical acclaim and is considered one of Allen's best films in recent years. In 2012, it won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. It was nominated for three other Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Art Direction.

Plot:

In 2010, Gil Pender, a successful but disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter, and his fiancée Inez are in Paris vacationing with Inez's wealthy, Republican parents. Gil is struggling to finish his debut novel, focusing on a man who works in a nostalgia shop. Inez dismisses his ambitions as a delusional dream and encourages him to stick with lucrative screenwriting. By chance, they meet Inez's friend Paul, who is described as both pedantic and a pseudo-intellectual, and his wife Carol. Paul speaks with great authority but questionable accuracy on the highlights of Paris, even contradicting a tour guide at the Musée Rodin, where he insists his knowledge of Rodin's relationships is more accurate than the guide's. Gil finds him annoying, yet Inez adores him.

A night of wine tasting gets Gil drunk, and he decides to walk the streets of Paris to return to the hotel; Inez goes off with Paul and Carol by taxi. Gil stops to get his bearings, and at midnight, a 1920s car pulls up beside him. The passengers, dressed in 1920s wardrobe, urge him to join them. They hit a party for Jean Cocteau attended by notable people of 1920s Paris: Cole Porter, his wife Linda Lee Porter, and Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Zelda gets bored and encourages Scott and Gil to leave with her. They first head to Bricktops, where they see Josephine Baker dancing, and then to a cafe where they run into Ernest Hemingway and Juan Belmonte. Zelda gets upset when Hemingway says her novel is weak, so she heads with Belmonte to St. Germain, followed by Scott, who doesn't like his wife with the matador. After discussing writing, Hemingway offers to show Gil's novel to Gertrude Stein. But as Gil exits the building to fetch his manuscript from his hotel, he returns to 2010: the bar with the 1920s literati is now a laundromat.

The next night, Gil wants to share with Inez his time-travel experience. But she ditches Gil before the clock strikes midnight. When it does, the same car returns; Gil joins Hemingway on his way to visit a friend. Gil is introduced to Gertrude Stein and other friends—Pablo Picasso and his lover Adriana—at her apartment. Adriana and Gil are instantly attracted to each other. Stein reads aloud the novel's first line:

'Out of the Past' was the name of the store, and its products consisted of memories: what was prosaic and even vulgar to one generation had been transmuted by the mere passing of years to a status at once magical and also camp.

Adriana says that she is hooked and that she has always had a longing for the past, especially the Belle Époque.

Gil continues his time travel for the next couple of nights. Inez is unimpressed with the boulevards and bistros and Gil's disappearing, while her father is suspicious and hires a private detective to follow him. Adriana has her time with Picasso and Hemingway, and eventually Gil, although he is conflicted by his attraction to her. Gil explains his inner conflict to Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Luis Buñuel, but as surrealists, they find his claim about coming from the future normal. Gil later suggests the plot of the film The Exterminating Angel to Buñuel, which he doesn't understand.

Inez and her parents are traveling to Mont Saint Michel while Gil meets Gabrielle, an antique dealer and fellow admirer of the Lost Generation. He buys a Cole Porter gramophone record from her and later finds at a book stall by the Seine Adriana's diary from the 1920s, which reveals that she was in love with him. Reading that she dreamed of receiving a gift of earrings from him and then making love to him, Gil tries to steal a pair of Inez's earrings to give to Adriana, but is thwarted by Inez's early return to the hotel room. So, Gil buys earrings for Adriana.

Returning to the past, he finds her at a party and tells her, "I sense there are some complicated feelings you have for me." He takes her for a walk, they kiss, and he gives her the earrings. While she's putting them on, a horse-drawn carriage comes down the street, and a richly dressed couple inside the carriage invite Gil and Adriana for a ride. The carriage transports the passengers to the Belle Époque, an era Adriana considers Paris's Golden Age. Gil and Adriana go first to Maxim's Paris, then to the Moulin Rouge where they meet Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas. Gil asks what they thought the best era was, and the three agree it is the Renaissance. The excited Adriana is offered a job designing ballet costumes and proposes to Gil that they stay, but Gil, upon observing that different people long for different "golden ages," realizes that despite the allure of nostalgia, any time can eventually become a dull present, so it's best to embrace your actual present. Adriana, however, decides to stay in the 1890s, and they part ways.

Gil rewrites the first two chapters of his novel and retrieves his draft from Stein, who praises his progress as a writer and tells him that Hemingway likes it but questions why the main character has not realized that his fiancée (based on Inez) is having an affair with the pedantic character (based on Paul).

Gil returns to 2010 and challenges Inez. She admits to having slept with Paul, but disregards it as a meaningless fling. Gil breaks up with her and decides to move to Paris. Amid Inez's pique, Gil calmly leaves, after which Inez's father tells her and her mother that he had Gil followed, though the detective has mysteriously disappeared. It is revealed that the detective found himself in the Versailles of Louis XIV and is last seen fleeing from the palace guards amid threats of "Off with his head!"

Walking by the Seine at midnight, Gil bumps into Gabrielle; he offers to walk her home after it starts to rain. They learn that they share the love of Paris in the rain.

Production

Writing:

Allen employed a reverse approach in writing the screenplay for this film, by building the film's plot around a conceived movie title, 'Midnight in Paris'. The time-travel portions of Allen's storyline are evocative of the Paris of the 1920s described in Ernest Hemingway's 1964 posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast, with Allen's characters interacting with the likes of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and uses the phrase "a moveable feast" in two instances, with a copy of the book appearing in one scene. Allen originally wrote the character Gil as an East Coast intellectual, but he rethought it when he and casting director Juliet Taylor began considering Owen Wilson for the role. "I thought Owen would be charming and funny but my fear was that he was not so Eastern at all in his persona," says Allen. Allen realized that making Gil a Californian would actually make the character richer, so he rewrote the part and submitted it to Wilson, who readily agreed to do it. Allen describes him as "a natural actor". The set-up has certain plot points in common with the 1990s British sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart, and the 2021 film Last Night In Soho.

Filming:

Principal photography began in Paris in July 2010. Allen states that the fundamental aesthetic for the camera work was to give the film a warm ambience. He describes that he likes it (the cinematography), "intensely red, intensely warm, because if you go to a restaurant and you're there with your wife or your girlfriend, and it's got red-flecked wallpaper and turn-of-the-century lights, you both look beautiful. Whereas if you're in a seafood restaurant and the lights are up, everybody looks terrible. So it looks nice. It's very flattering and very lovely." To achieve this he and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, used primarily warm colors in the film's photography, filmed in flatter weather and employed limited camera movements, in attempts to draw little attention to itself. This is the first Woody Allen film to go through a digital intermediate, instead of being color timed in the traditional photochemical way. According to Allen, its use here is a test to see if he likes it enough to use on his future films.

Allen's directorial style placed more emphasis on the romantic and realistic elements of the film than the fantasy elements. He states that he "was interested only in this romantic tale, and anything that contributed to it that was fairytale was right for me. I didn't want to get into it. I only wanted to get into what bore down on his (Owen Wilson's) relationship with Marion."

Locations:

The film opens with a 3+1⁄2-minute postcard-view montage of Paris, showing some of the iconic tourist sites. Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times describes the montage as a stylistic approach that lasts longer than necessary to simply establish location. According to Turan, "Allen is saying: Pay attention — this is a special place, a place where magic can happen." Midnight in Paris is the first Woody Allen film shot entirely on location in Paris, though both Love and Death (1975) and Everyone Says I Love You (1996) were partially filmed there.

Filming locations include Giverny, John XXIII Square (near Notre Dame), Montmartre, Deyrolle, the Palace of Versailles, the Opéra, Pont Alexandre III, the Sacré-Cœur, the Île de la Cité itself, and streets near the Panthéon.

Marketing:

The film is co-produced by Allen's Gravier Productions and the Catalan company Mediapro and was picked up by Sony Pictures Classics for distribution. It is the fourth film the two companies have co-produced, the others being Sweet and Lowdown, Whatever Works and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.

In promoting the film, Allen was willing to do only a limited amount of publicity at its Cannes Film Festival debut in May. Wilson was already committed to promoting Pixar's Cars 2, which opened in late June, several weeks after Allen's film arrived in cinemas. Due to these challenges and the relatively small ($10 million) budget for promotion, Sony Classics had to perform careful media buying and press relations to promote the film.

The film's poster is a reference to Vincent van Gogh's 1889 painting The Starry Night.

Box Office:

The film made its debut at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday May 11, when it opened the festival as a first screening for both professionals and the public; it was released nationwide in France that same day, Wednesday being the traditional day of change in French cinemas. It went on limited release in six theatres in the United States on May 20 and took $599,003 in the first weekend, spreading to 944 cinemas three weeks later, when it went on wide release.

Midnight in Paris achieved the highest gross of any of Allen's films in North America, before adjusting for inflation. The film earned $56.3 million in North America, overtaking his previous best, Hannah and Her Sisters, at $40 million. Documents from the Sony Pictures hack revealed the film turned a profit of $24 million.

As of 2016, Midnight in Paris is the highest-grossing film directed by Woody Allen, with $151 million worldwide on a $17 million budget

My Reviews:

This movie... It captures so beautifully what is so inexplicable, poignant, and breath-taking about Paris. Now, before watching, I hadn’t really bought into the hype of Paris. Of course there's the landmarks but it's never been a dream destination of mine. Because, like any city, it has its negative aspects. Parts of it can be smelly, and dirty. There is poverty, and drug addicts, and other sad sights. It’s not a perfect place. But this movie has introduced me to another side that I've never thought about before. If you immerse yourself in the city, and not just spend a night or two seeing sights as so many do when on holiday, not to mention— have a romantic heart, like Gil— you will realize the true beauty of this wondrous city. That is: it’s always been this way. It’s always been a shooting star of light and wonder, yet simultaneously, a place of lost dreams, heartbreak, or just flat-out disappointment. And despite these conflicting qualities, it drew people there, and tethered them to it. Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and all those before and after. If you have an open mind and open heart, and travel to know and not just see, you will get a glimpse of this Paris, that has always been and always will be. On the banks of the Seine late at night, or looking out your window early in the morning. It’s a place where dreams begin and end, where people are inspired and become lost, where beauty and art are everywhere and nowhere. The history of this place is so well-contained and preserved, it’s almost palpable. Of course, there will always be people who pass through Paris, are underwhelmed, bored, and can’t wait to depart— there’s always been these people. Just like Inez and her family in the movie. Very well, then.

Beyond the essence of Paris captured so nicely in this film, the acting is actually very good. Rachel McAdams plays her role so well it’s almost off-putting— if anyone’s ever been in this sort of relationship, it’s a little uncomfortable and sad to watch. Many relationships consist of one person trying to change the dreams and passions of another, and sometimes, they do. This is a tragedy. Marion Cotillard is so exquisitely lovely, and the actors portraying the writers and artists all of the 20s icons do a nice job of playing a somewhat corny role, and giving those characters life and idiosyncrasies beyond what history speaks of them. {And yes, the main reason I came across this film is because of Tom Hiddleston, even though he wasn't in it as much he did play a decent part. Even if his character is a asshole to his wife, played by Alison Pill's character... OOOHHH I'm such a sucker for Hiddleston!!!!}.

I thoroughly enjoyed this film. The outstanding cinematography allowed us to see why Paris is considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The imaginative script was clever introducing an array of famous characters from times gone-by. The acting was good and gave an aura of light-heartedness which was a breath of fresh air. It also had a degree of sophistication removing any criticism of silliness. It’s a lovely movie. The music is soothing to the soul. Perfect to watch whenever you need a little magic and beauty in your life; 10/10.