A charmer from Woody

Rating: Null/10 (6 April 2012)

On two things Woody Allen's admirers would agree, he is both a master entertainer and a director of considerable technical accomplishment. Most would also agree that his habit of producing one new work each year has led him into the pitfall of unevenness, a fault he shares with the French master, Claude Chabrol. But when it comes to identifying the highs and lows of his over prolific career, the disagreement starts. Is the "Annie Hall", "Manhattan", "Hannah and her Sisters" period really his best? I have personal reservations about these and, at the same time, I am aware that my own favourites are not always shared by others. For me "Love and Death" is a comic masterpiece which manages to sustain a stream of gags without ever becoming stale on repeated viewings. "Radio Days" achieves that sense of nostalgia for a place and time past that was the endearing quality of my favourite Fellini, "Amarcord". "Everyone Says I Love You" is a simply gorgeous musical which takes the passing of a year framework adopted for "Hannah" and improves on it. And what about the slyly wicked "Match Point" with its echoes of Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" - Woody at his darkest and, dare I say, finest. And then there are those moments particularly in his more recent career that get the critics saying excitedly that Woody is over his self obsessed doldrums and has regained something of his former brilliance. They said it with "Melinda and Melinda" which I am afraid I found one great yawn. And now they are saying it again with "Midnight in Paris" with perhaps rather more justification. This is a quite charming film in the Woody Allen canon, if, to my mind, a minor one. Not that it starts particularly promisingly. In "Manhattan" the wonderful opening shots of New York accompanied by a swirl of Gershwin, somehow conveyed the director's total immersion in his love of a great city because they were so successfully subsumed into the context of the movie. A similar attempt to do the same with Paris with little more than a set of picture postcard shots is rather tame and conventional by comparison. Enter the American visitors with their endless yakking in restaurants, hotels and famous sites and I feared the worst, another one of Woody's conversation pieces going nowhere. But shortly into the film with the stroke of midnight and the sudden appearance of the 1920's car it all changes and we are in that world of fantasy that Woody does rather well. Remember "The Purple Rose of Cairo" and his contribution to "New York Stories"! Here the hero first stumbles into the world of the 20's and then into La Belle Epoque meeting up with an assortment of the great and famous, several of them rather good look-alikes. It's all enjoyable, clever stuff and if not quite one of his peaks, a reassurance that even with just over 40 films behind him, Woody still has the ability on occasions to delight and surprise.