FANTASY COMEDY-DRAMA; 1hr 34min
STARRING: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams
A moveable feast: Wilson and McAdams
Woody Allen’s rhapsodic opening montage for his whimsical bonbon does for the pearly lustre of the City of Light what the filmmaker has long done for his cherished Manhattan. Visiting Hollywood screenwriter and self-described hack Gil (Wilson) is into Paris in a big way, too; his Malibu-centric fiancée, Inez (McAdams), she being pushy and pragmatic while he’s a gentle romantic who dreams of throwing in the moneymaking towel for a Parisian attic and a novel in the works.
So Gil and Inez are perceptional worlds apart even before he happens upon a midnight 1920s dimension in which the mythical likes of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill), Cole Porter (Yves Heck), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) and Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody) hold nonchalant court. Rubbing shoulders with them and falling for incandescent muse Ariana (Marion Cotillard), Gil’s longing eyes are opened, and how could they not be? Of all possible places for a man to slip through time and realise his desires, Monsieur Allen’s Paris is a fairy-tale portal.
