Midnight In Paris

Woody Allen arrived at the Cannes Film Festival with a love letter to France: a romantic fantasy called Midnight In Paris in which an American writer (played by Owen Wilson) on vacation in Paris becomes infatuated with all the clichés  – the cobbled streets, the Eiffel Tower, the glorious memories of the "movable feast" that brought Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and others to the city in the 1920s. It's a billet doux to Gertrude Stein's Paris, Pablo Picasso's Paris, Cole Porter's Paris.

It was the perfect film to launch this year's Cannes Film Festival  – the fifth time an Allen film has done so. It brought to the Croisette a mood of warm, autumnal nostalgia as its hero travels back in time to the magical glories of that earlier burnished era.

But you can't fool Woody Allen. "It's a big trap to think living in an earlier time would be better," Allen said after the first screening of the film, which brought applause from the world's media. "You only extrapolate the nice things. When you went to the dentist, there was no novocaine. There was no air conditioning or anything."

He went on, "There's no time but right now. It sounds seductive, but it's a trap." Right now looks pretty good to Allen.

Midnight In Paris, his 42nd film, has a more optimistic feeling than You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, his 2010 Cannes film about impending death, a movie that had him speculating about the horrors of old age. His new movie is a return to the kind of cinematic valentines he used to make to New York City.

He says he made this movie the same way. "I learned about Paris the same way all Americans do – through the movies," he said. He didn't visit the city until 1965, when he was an adult, and for him it was the city he had seen depicted in American films. Likewise, he said, the New York City he shows to the world isn't the one he lives in, but rather one that comes from the movies.

"It's Paris as seen through my eyes emotionally," he said. "I love cities in the rain and Paris is particularly beautiful in the rain."

The image of wet streets is one of the themes of Midnight In Paris. Wilson's character, named Gil, is in Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams). But as she shops with her parents and flirts with an old friend who's an expert in all things – a stock character in Allen movies – Gil finds himself drawn away from his life and down into cultural history in a surprisingly realistic way.

Allen has a matter-of-fact self-deprecation that he uses as a kind of low-key comedy. He said he thought of the title Midnight in Paris and it appealed to him, "but I didn't know what was going to happen at midnight in Paris. And months went by. And I couldn't think of what happened at midnight in Paris. People meet, or they meet at the Ritz Hotel, or someone getting a divorce. I just couldn't think of anything. Then it occurred to me one day." He said he was lucky to think of it, because if he had thought of something terrible or nothing at all, he would have had to change the title.

Allen similarly described how he came to cast Carla Bruni, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in a small role in the movie: he had breakfast with the Sarkozys, "and I thought she was very beautiful and charming and charismatic, and I asked would you like to be in a movie." Bruni – who was absent from the festival – accepted because it would be something to tell her grandchildren about.

She's just one member of a group of interesting actors – Kathy Bates and Adrien Brody are also featured – who are part of the secret to his success.

"The trick in casting is to hire great people, let them do what they do, don't interfere too much, and then when they're great, take credit for it," Allen said. "I've done this for years. Works like a charm."

– Jay Stone, The Ottawa Citizen