Charming

Rating: 9/10 (31 July 2015)

"Midnight in Paris" does not have Woody Allen on a screen - but his alter ego is present in character of gentle dreamer (Owen Wilson) who roams romantic streets of Paris with his obnoxious fiancé and her parents chained to his leg. Its obvious that this is not a good fit and why would they even insist of catching him as a bridegroom when they hardly bear him is not truly explained, but director suggest it would be just another marriage of convenience. "Well, we have lots in common..." muses Wilson "for example we love Indian food..." and as the city gets under his skin, this dream seems to vanish because he can clearly see himself living different, another life far from these materialistic people. What follows is another typical Woody Allen magical realism where characters get lost in time. If anyone else made this, it would be sacrilege because it has already been done - but Woody Allen has all the right in the world to play with his own older ideas and he does it with grace, humor and magic. There is a very interesting question somewhere in all of this, about meaning of "good old days" which are always imaginary Heaven when compared to present time, movie suggest that this is illusion because any time was difficult for people for whom it was present. The movie charmed the socks off critics and audiences around the world and reminded me how much I always loved Woody Allen.