Spot the faces and the names

Rating: Null/10 (21 April 2012)

A classic film genre is what might be called the 'fish out of water' scenario where the central character is in a different country ("Crocodile Dundee") or culture ("East Is East") or planet ("John Carter") or body ("Big") or time ("The Time Machine"). Writer and director Woody Allen has used the shift in time approach in many of his films and it is central to "Midnight In Paris" where we visit both the 1920s and the 1890s. Now in his seventies, the role he would in the past have filled himself is taken by the engaging Owen Wilson, but essentially it is the same character that Allen has played so often: a writer troubled by his personal and professional lives and musing about alternative choices that he might have made or might still make.
The line up of characters - both in the narrative and in the cast list - is amazing. The story features writers like Scott Fitzerald and T S Eliot , musicians like Cole Porter and Josephine Baker, and any number of artists from Picasso to Toulouse-Lautrec. The actors include Rachel McAdams, Michael Sheen and Kathy Bates - with even a cameo role by the French President's wife Carla Bruni. So it is very much a film for spotting faces and names as well as listening to Allen's witty script with its constant cultural references. Indeed, in a move away from his beloved New York, the city of Paris itself is a character in the movie from the opening seconds of iconic shots of the sights in both sunshine and rain.
The message of this gentle and entertaining romantic comedy is that, instead of fantasising that a previous age or epoch was so much better, we should make the most of here and now.