Gil Pender is a Hollywood writer, who is vacationing in Paris, France with his fiance Inez and her parents. An affable, self-effacing character, Gil is torn between moving to Paris to write a great novel or to live in Malibu with Inez and continue to work in Hollywood. He is enraptured by Golden Age thinking. He's in love with Paris in the 1920's. Coincidentally, the plot of his novel revolves around a protagonist who works in a nostalgia shop. While his fiance is enjoying Paris night life, Gil Pender finds himself traveling back in time at the stroke of midnight. He meets famous literati, like Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. They feed his obsession with moving to Paris and living in the place that epitomizes his ideal world view. He tells his wife Inez that he's walking the streets of Paris as inspiration for his novel. His wife is too preoccupied with friends and excursions to suspect anything else. While Gil travels back to 1920s Paris, he meets a beautiful woman named Adriana. He starts falling in love with her.
I'll stop there. The movie has a stellar cast with the likes of Kathy Bates and Adrien Brody. Adrien Brody plays a phenomenal Salvador Dali. You learn a lot of superficial information about Paris in the last 150 years and encounter notable artists of ages gone by. This is by far one of Woody Allen's best movies and I highly recommend going to the theater to see it. After watching the film, I was reminded why I fell in love with Paris, France all those years ago when I first visited it. A must see for all Francophiles. The movie presented Paris in the present and in the past. And it was all glorious. Do go see it. It would be money well spent.
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| Midnight in Paris |
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