It's ironic that few of the faces in line for the opening-night film at the 64th Cannes film festival betrayed any sign of anticipation, let alone excitement. For one the thing, the screening was in the slightly smaller Debussy screening room and not the enormous Lumiere, so there was a very real feeling that not everyone would get in. But more ominous than that was the film we were all queuing to see: Midnight In Paris, the latest in a very patchy series of comedies by New York's Woody Allen, a director whose recent work can at best be described as OK-to-good and at worst... well, let's just say I thought my one-star review for Cassandra's Dream was generous.
Thankfully, after a truly awful opening montage of Parisian tourist spots that gives new meaning to the word “lazy”, Midnight In Paris proved to be just about not bad. It's one of Allen's fantastical films (think Purple Rose Of Cairo rather than Sleeper), and if he'd written it properly, when he was sharper and funnier, and shot it 35 years ago it could easily have been one of his best. Fittingly, this is a film about nostalgia, starring Owen Wilson as Gil Pender, a screenwriter of Hollywood trash who goes to Paris with his wife-to-be, Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her parents in the run-up to their marriage. Pender wants to visit Paris to kickstart his creative machinery, having been working on the great American novel, but while they're there, Inez meets a pompous old college friend (Michael Sheen) and decides she prefers his and his wife's company to the introspective Gil's.
This is how, after a night of wine-tasting, Gil finds himself alone, standing on a random street corner, when the clock strikes midnight and a vintage car approaches. The car pulls up and a gaggle of champagne-swigging swells invite him in and literally spirit him away to a party. Gil meets a woman called Zelda and her husband Scott in a room where everyone gathers round the piano to hear the witty songs of the composer Cole Porter. It takes a while to sink in, but after a few moments it dawns on Gil that this is not a dream or a fancy-dress party; those really are the Fitzgeralds he's talking to and the man on the piano actually IS Cole Porter.
There are echoes here of Play It Again Sam, especially when Gil meets his idol, Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), who offers pithy lines of literary wisdom. But when Hemingway takes Gil to meet the famous arts patron Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), the film takes a more familiar turn: Gil meets Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a beautiful socialite who has been a muse to all the great painters, most recently Picasso. Gil is smitten, and faces the dilemma that has haunted many a protagonist in a Woody Allen movie (usually one he plays himself): which beautiful woman do I want to end up with? Typically the most off-putting element in a Woody Allen movie, this time it actually works, largely thanks to Owen Wilson's quite adorable performance. It's amazing how many of Allen's usually irritating foibles he manages to make endearing – the dreary middle-class ennui, the literary pretensions and the shaky-hand mannerisms seem natural and almost, for want of a better word, unaffected.
The film works best in the fantasy sections, and Allen has a lot of fun with his characters (Adrien Brody's cameo as Salvador Dali is especially good). Back in the present day, though, the story huffs and puffs and limps along. Inez is awful, her friends insufferable, her parents even worse, and their weighty company drags what ought to be a light, breezy pace to a crawl (an awful scene involving a pair of missing earrings is the director's worst stab at farce since Hollywood Ending). McAdams and Cotillard are underused, but not as flagrantly as the French First Lady Carla Bruni, whose flat, wooden turn as a tour guide offers both too much and not enough. And worse, when Gil finally learns the hard way how hard it is to love someone who's living in the past, Allen spells it out with some rotten, spell-it-all-out dialogue that really shouldn't have survived the first draft.
There was polite applause at the end, from a not-too-bright audience that didn't seem to pick up some classic Allen references (at one point, Gil gives a young Luis Bunuel some advice that will later lead him to make The Exterminating Angel), but that, in itself, was some kind of achievement. And as opening films go, it was just about good enough to give us hope.
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