We've all been asked at one point or another if there's an era we'd have rather visited, rather existed within...and I can't recall a single answer where someone said "the current one." I'm sure there are people out there who relish in the technocratic ways of the new millennium, but I'm certainly not one of them. I don't think the vast majority of people are, if we were to poll them. Perhaps this has something to do with the nature of history - we already know the outcome, we already know the significance of the people and things that occurred. They've since been exalted into the public mythos and somehow elevated into the lexicon of the now.
But this is the kind of question Allen poses to his main character Gil Pender (played by Owen Wilson). Gil is a Hollywood screenwriter unhappy with the work that has made him successful. He has completed a novel that he won't let anyone read (not even his fiancee Inez, played by Rachel McAdams). The couple are in Paris supporting the expansion of Inez's father's company. Neither of her parents like Gil and Gil isn't especially taken by either of them, but the tension is pretty old hat for the traditional dynamic between potential son-in-laws and parents.
Gil wants to move to Paris after the wedding, but Inez wants to move to Malibu. Gil wants to walk through the rainy Paris streets, Inez hates the rain and prefers driving. Gil wants to enjoy the night air of Paris, Inez wants to go clubbing with an old (annoyingly know-it-all and pedantic) friend and his wife. The dissimilarities between the couple become more and more obvious (and increasingly uninteresting) the longer the movie plays out, but also lead Gil to question whether Inez is the right woman for him.
There is also the matter of Gil time-travelling back to Paris in the 1920's. And meeting a slew of passionate, creative, genius-level behemoths in the world of the arts: Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald (and his wife Zelda), Hemingway, Man Ray, Dali (played by Adrian Brody), Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, Juan Belmonte, Gertrude Stein (a gregarious Kathy Bates), Luis Bunuel, T.S. Eliot, Matisse, Gauguin, and Degas.
Needless to say, Gil is floored. Not only has he been given the strange and opportunistic chance to visit his desired era, he's meeting some of the generation's most notable, most notorious denizens who have changed the face of the respective arts that they practice. He also wonders if he's fallen in love with Picasso's mistress, Adriana (played by Marion Cotillard) who also wishes she had been born in a different era. Different paths leading to different pasts are apparently littered across the streets of Paris...but only after the clock strikes midnight.
This was the first Woody Allen movie I've ever seen, but I enjoyed it. This could have easily been a two and a half hour movie with a little more in-depth and subversive discussion of the main themes. The whimsy and magical nature of someone inexplicably being pulled into a completely different era is never explained, but it didn't have to be. Paris itself has been described by generations of people as being a magical place (itself a mythos in our historical lexicon), but we tend to know what Gil will end up doing about his life, his novel, and his fiancee by the end of the film. This was a completely enjoyable film and some of the best parts for me personally were Hemingway's quotes delivered with deep gusto and machismo by Corey Stoll.
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