Midnight in Paris

''Midnight in Paris'' is a 2011 fantasy comedy film written and directed by Woody Allen. Set in Paris, the film follows Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a screenwriter and aspiring novelist, who is forced to confront the shortcomings of his relationship with his materialistic fiancée ( Rachel McAdams) and their divergent goals, which become increasingly exaggerated as he travels back in time to the 1920s each night at midnight.

Produced by the Spanish group Mediapro and Allen's US-based Gravier Productions, the film stars Wilson, McAdams, Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody, Carla Bruni, Tom Hiddleston, Marion Cotillard, and Michael Sheen. It premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival and was released in the United States on May 20, 2011. The film opened to critical acclaim. In 2012, it won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. It was nominated for three other Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director and Best Art Direction.

Plot

In 2010, disillusioned screenwriter Gil Pender and his fiancée, Inez, vacation in Paris with Inez's wealthy parents. Gil, struggling to finish his debut novel about a man who works in a nostalgia shop, finds himself drawn to the artistic history of Paris, especially the Lost Generation of the 1920s, and has ambitions to move there, which Inez dismisses. By chance, they meet Inez's old college friend, Paul, and his wife, Carol. Paul speaks with great authority but questionable accuracy on French history, annoying Gil but impressing Inez.

Intoxicated after a night of wine tasting, Gil decides to walk back to their hotel, while Inez goes with Paul and Carol by taxi. At midnight, a 1920s car pulls up beside Gil and delivers him to a party for Jean Cocteau, attended by other people of the 1920s Paris art scene. Zelda Fitzgerald, bored, encourages her husband Scott and Gil to leave with her. They head to a cafe where they run into Ernest Hemingway and Juan Belmonte. After Zelda and Scott leave, Gil and Hemingway discuss writing, and Hemingway offers to show Gil's novel to Gertrude Stein. As Gil leaves to fetch his manuscript, he returns to 2010 only to find a laundromat in the cafe's location.

The next night, Gil tries to repeat the experience, this time bringing Inez but she returns to the hotel before midnight. Returning to the 1920s, he accompanies Hemingway to visit Gertrude Stein, who is critiquing Pablo Picasso's new painting of his lover Adriana. Gil becomes drawn to Adriana, a costume designer who also had affairs with Amedeo Modigliani and Georges Braque. Having heard the first line of Gil's novel, Adriana praises it and admits she has always longed for the past.

Inez grows jaded with Paris and Gil's continual disappearances, while her father grows suspicious and hires a private detective to follow him.

Gil continues to time-travel the following nights. Adriana leaves Picasso and continues to bond with Gil, who is conflicted by his attraction to her. Gil explains his situation to Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, and Luis Buñuel; as surrealists, they do not question his claim of coming from the future. Gil later suggests the plot of "The Exterminating Angel" to Buñuel.

Back in the present, Gil meets Gabrielle, an antique dealer and fellow admirer of the Lost Generation. Later at a book stall he finds Adriana's diary, which reveals that she had been in love with Gil and dreamed of being gifted earrings before making love to him. Planning to seduce Adriana, Gil plans to take a pair of Inez's earrings but is thwarted by her early return to the hotel room.

Gil instead buys new earrings, giving them to Adriana after returning again to the past. Later, a horse-drawn carriage appears and transports them to the Belle Époque, an era Adriana considers Paris's Golden Age. They go to the Moulin Rouge where they meet Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas, who all agree that Paris's best era was the Renaissance. Adriana is offered a job designing ballet costumes; thrilled, she proposes to Gil that they stay. But he, observing the unhappiness of Adriana and the other artists, realizes that chasing nostalgia is fruitless because the present is always "a little unsatisfying." Adriana decides to stay, and they part ways. Meanwhile, the detective following Gil takes a "wrong turn" and ends up being chased by the palace guards of Louis XVI just before a revolution breaks out.

Gil rewrites the first two chapters of his novel and gives his draft to Stein, who praises his rewrite. Still, Hemingway says that on reading the new chapters he does not believe that the protagonist does not realize that his fiancée (based on Inez) is having an affair with the character based on Paul. Gil returns to 2010 and confronts Inez, who admits to sleeping with Paul but regarded it as a meaningless fling. Gil breaks up with her and decides to stay in Paris.

While walking by the Seine at midnight, no carriage comes by but Gil encounters Gabrielle. As it begins to rain, he offers to walk her home and learns that they share a love for Paris in the rain.

Cast

Main cast

Notes on the cast

This is the second time McAdams and Wilson co-starred as a couple; they did so before in 2005's ''Wedding Crashers''. In comparing the two roles, McAdams describes the one in ''Midnight in Paris'' as being far more antagonistic than the role in ''Wedding Crashers''. Allen had high praise for her performance and that of co-star Marion Cotillard. Cotillard was cast as Wilson's other love interest, the charismatic Adriana.

Carla Bruni, singer-songwriter and wife of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, was recruited by Allen for a role as a museum guide. There were false reports that Allen re-filmed Bruni's scenes with Léa Seydoux, but Seydoux rebuffed these rumors revealing she had an entirely separate role in the film. Allen also shot down reports that a scene with Bruni required over 30 takes: "I am appalled. I read these things and I could not believe my eyes ... These are not exaggerations, but inventions from scratch. There is absolutely no truth." He continued to describe Bruni as "very professional" and insisted he was pleased with her scenes, stating that "every frame will appear in the film."

Production

Writing

Allen employed a reverse approach in writing the screenplay for this film, by building the film's plot around a conceived movie title, 'Midnight in Paris'. The time-travel portions of Allen's storyline are evocative of the Paris of the 1920s described in Ernest Hemingway's 1964 posthumously published memoir '' A Moveable Feast,'' with Allen's characters interacting with the likes of Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and using the phrase "a moveable feast" in two instances, with a copy of the book appearing in one scene.

Allen originally wrote the character Gil as an East Coast intellectual, but he rethought it when he and casting director Juliet Taylor began considering Owen Wilson for the role. "I thought Owen would be charming and funny but my fear was that he was not so Eastern at all in his persona," says Allen, who realized that making Gil a Californian would actually make the character richer, so he rewrote the part and submitted it to Wilson, who readily agreed to do it. Allen describes him as "a natural actor". The set-up has certain plot points in common with the 1990s British sitcom '' Goodnight Sweetheart''.

Filming

Principal photography began in Paris in July 2010. Allen states that the fundamental aesthetic for the camera work was to give the film a warm ambiance. He describes that he likes it (the cinematography), "intensely red, intensely warm because if you go to a restaurant and you're there with your wife or your girlfriend, and it's got red-flecked wallpaper and turn-of-the-century lights, you both look beautiful. Whereas if you're in a seafood restaurant and the lights are up, everybody looks terrible. So it looks nice. It's very flattering and very lovely." To achieve this he and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, used primarily warm colours in the film's photography, filmed in flatter weather and employed limited camera movements, in attempts to draw little attention to the cinematography. This is the first Woody Allen film to go through a digital intermediate, instead of being color timed in the traditional photochemical way. According to Allen, its use here is a test to see if he likes it enough to use in his future films.

Allen's directorial style placed more emphasis on the romantic and realistic elements of the film than the fantasy elements. He states that he "was interested only in this romantic tale, and anything that contributed to it that was fairytale was right for me. I didn't want to get into it. I only wanted to get into what bore down on his (Owen Wilson's) relationship with Marion."

Locations

The film opens with a -minute postcard-view montage of Paris, showing some of the iconic tourist sites. Kenneth Turan of the ''Los Angeles Times'' describes the montage as a stylistic approach that lasts longer than necessary to simply establish location. According to Turan, "Allen is saying: Pay attention – this is a special place, a place where magic can happen."

''Midnight in Paris'' is the first Woody Allen film shot entirely on location in Paris, though both ''Love and Death'' (1975) and '' Everyone Says I Love You'' (1996) were partially filmed there. Filming locations include Giverny

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