A smart, warm, funny ribbing of nostalgia.

Rating: 9/10 (7 June 2017)

I don't generally consider myself a fan of Woody Allen, and I'm not one of those romantics who gets all misty-eyed at the thought of 1920s Paris. I was more than a little surprised, then, to discover how deeply I enjoyed this film! It's smart, funny, full of heart and interesting ideas.
In this typically deadpan and chatty Woody Allen comedy, a middle-aged American named Gil (Owen Wilson) is visiting Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachael McAdams) and her parents, as well as a couple of her friends. Gil has made some good money as a screen writing hack, but he yearns for a more artistic kind of achievement, and so he's been trying to write a novel. He is delighted by the city, finds all his romantic yearnings awakened by it. His fiancée and her family, meanwhile, are put-off by his romanticism; their experience in life is more superficial; they take- in the city as if on a guided tour, groaning about the inconveniences and the rich food, shopping for antiques, as if the entire trip only represents to them a kind of status-symbol, a collection of items and experiences they can use to say, "I am of that kind of class."
Gil's book, it seems, is about a character who runs a nostalgia shop. His fiancée sees this as an indictment of his desire to live in the past, and she may be right about that. Gil is particularly in love with 1920s- era Paris, that time and place where a crop of reckless young artists were crafting their foundational works -- the roster including names like Earnest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Cole Porter, Picasso, Dali, Bunuel.
Late one night as Gil is walking alone on the Parisian street, he is approached by a curious old 1920s Peugeot. The cabin opens and one of the riders, in period dress, invites him inside. With no explanation, Gil is whisked away to a party in another time, where he discovers that the man playing the piano is in fact Cole Porter, and that the Fitzgeralds he is speaking to are, in fact, THE Fitzgeralds.
After a dizzying night meeting his heroes, he finds himself back in his hotel room, confounded but inspired. And soon, the pattern repeats: By day, he humors his fiancée and her family; by night, he talks and drinks and dances with his heroes in 1920s Paris.
Gil soon meets a girl in the 1920s, and this brings a romantic crisis into the plot. But for much of its runtime, the film simply has fun simply following Gil amongst these people, and contrasting his meek artistic yearnings to those of his heroes, whose sudden living presence reveals them to be perhaps more human than he'd imagined. In a sequence that I truly relished, Gil has a nonsensical conversation in a cafe with Salvador Dali, Louis Bunuel, and Man Ray. To these three famous surrealists, Gil confesses that he is from another time, the year 2010. "So far, I see nothing strange," says Man Ray.
The film is full of moments like these, and Allen's film assumes the viewer's familiarity with its subjects. Had someone warned me about that, I might have expected the film to fly right over my head. But no, actually, I found much delight in these scenes, and I was surprised by how many of these famous artists I knew. I suppose it helps that I have read some Earnest Hemingway, and am familiar with the Fitzgeralds, as well as Cole Porter and the surrealist painters. What I guess I never quite realized, however -- which this movie aptly demonstrated for me -- was just how many talented folks lived and worked and reveled within that city at that time. It certainly was an era of artistic abundance.
The film also has fun ribbing the very idea of nostalgia. "Nostalgia is denial, denial of the painful present," says a friend of Gil's fiancée, as they stroll around the grounds of Versaille. "It's the erroneous notion that a different time-period is better than the one one's living in." Later, Gil will find people in the 1920's who pine for a period 20 years earlier. And then, in that period, he discovers folks who pine for the Rennaissance. We always think our own era has no imagination, the film argues. Even our artistic heroes thought that of their own eras.
Anyway, it's an intelligent and funny film, and I definitely recommend it