Midnight in Paris (2011)
Film overview
Paris, nostalgia and the temptation of another time
Midnight in Paris follows Gil Pender, a Hollywood screenwriter trying to finish his first novel while visiting Paris with his fiancée Inez and her parents. Gil is immediately enchanted by the city and begins imagining a very different life there, while Inez is far less interested in abandoning the future they have planned together.
Walking through Paris alone one night, Gil finds himself transported back to the 1920s — the period he has always regarded as the city's golden age. Suddenly he is drinking with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, discussing his writing with Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, and meeting artists and writers he previously knew only through their work.
His fascination with the past becomes more complicated when he meets Adriana, played by Marion Cotillard, and discovers that she has her own romantic idea of an earlier Paris. What begins as a fantasy about escaping the present gradually becomes a story about why people are so easily persuaded that another time would have been better than their own.
Owen Wilson leads an ensemble that includes Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen, Corey Stoll, Alison Pill, Tom Hiddleston, Kathy Bates and Adrien Brody. Shot throughout Paris by cinematographer Darius Khondji, the film moves between contemporary Paris and Gil's imagined golden age while allowing the city itself to remain at the centre of the experience.
Watch Midnight in Paris
My review
The irresistible pull of another Paris
Of all Woody Allen's later films, Midnight in Paris is the one I return to most often. Part of that is because I love the film, but part of it is inevitably personal. Paris has been part of my life since childhood, and watching the film always brings back places, streets and memories that already mean something to me.
I have been visiting Paris since I was a child. Since returning from the United States to the UK in 2017, I have also celebrated my birthday there every year. Over time I have found myself returning not only to Paris itself but to places used in the film, including meals at Polidor and walks through other locations that have become immediately recognisable because of Midnight in Paris.
That probably explains why the opening sequence works on me every single time. Before Gil, Inez or the story have even properly begun, Allen simply allows us to look at Paris. The city changes through the day, through different weather and eventually into the evening. For anyone who already loves Paris, it is difficult not to surrender to the film before anybody has spoken.
Owen Wilson is one of the reasons the fantasy works as well as it does. Gil could easily have become another variation on the familiar anxious Allen protagonist, but Wilson plays him with an openness and slightly bewildered enthusiasm that feels completely his own. When extraordinary things begin happening to him, his response is less panic than amazement. He wants all of it to be true.
What Gil wants, of course, is not really time travel. He wants an escape from the life he has constructed for himself. He dislikes the Hollywood work that has made him successful, doubts his ability to become a serious novelist and is engaged to a woman whose idea of their future seems increasingly incompatible with his own.
Paris gives those feelings somewhere to go. Gil imagines that the problem is simply that he has been born at the wrong time. If only he could have lived in Paris during the 1920s, surrounded by the writers and artists he admires, perhaps he would finally feel that he belonged somewhere.
The film is clever enough to give him exactly what he wants. F. Scott Fitzgerald appears. Zelda Fitzgerald appears. Ernest Hemingway listens to him talk about his novel. Gertrude Stein reads his manuscript. Picasso, Dalí, Buñuel and others drift through this impossible version of Paris as casually as people Gil might meet in a café.
Corey Stoll's Hemingway is one of the great pleasures of the film. The performance takes Hemingway's famously direct prose and turns it into a wonderfully deadpan way of speaking. He discusses courage, love, death and writing with such absolute seriousness that almost every appearance becomes funny without turning Hemingway into a simple caricature.
I particularly love that Gil's encounter with Hemingway takes us to Polidor. Visiting and eating there now inevitably carries the film with it for me. It is one of those rare cases where knowing a film location doesn't make the real place feel less interesting. It adds another layer to somewhere that already has its own history.
The same thing happens throughout Paris. The steps where Gil waits for the car at midnight, the Seine, the bridges, the gardens, the streets around the Latin Quarter — returning to these places after knowing the film makes it remarkably easy to understand why he wants to believe another Paris might be waiting just around the corner.
Marion Cotillard is perfectly cast as Adriana because she seems to belong to the dream without ever becoming unreal. Gil immediately sees her as part of everything he loves about the 1920s, but the crucial twist is that Adriana doesn't regard her own period as a golden age at all.
Adriana dreams instead of the Belle Époque. When she and Gil are given the opportunity to visit it, the entire premise turns back on him. The people they meet there are dissatisfied with their own time too. Their ideal period lies even further in the past.
That is where Midnight in Paris becomes much more than a charming fantasy. Nostalgia is seductive partly because the past has already been edited. We know its paintings, books, music, buildings and photographs. We do not experience its ordinary frustrations in the same way as the people who actually lived through it.
Gil has romanticised the 1920s in exactly the same way Adriana has romanticised the 1890s. The fantasy only works while he imagines everybody else living happily inside history.
That idea has always struck me as particularly true of Paris. Few cities make it easier to imagine previous lives continuing alongside the present. You can walk down a street that looks almost unchanged in an old photograph, sit in a restaurant with more than a century of history behind it, or cross a bridge and suddenly understand why generations of writers and filmmakers became obsessed with the same view.
Darius Khondji's photography is essential to all of this. Paris is warm, rich and inviting without becoming glossy. Night seems particularly important. Street lamps, restaurants, old interiors and wet pavements give Gil's Paris the feeling of somewhere in which an impossible encounter might almost be believable.
Rachel McAdams and Michael Sheen have the less enviable task of representing the present Gil increasingly wants to leave behind. McAdams makes Inez abrasive, but also makes it clear how little she and Gil understand one another. Michael Sheen's Paul is gloriously irritating: confident, knowledgeable and seemingly incapable of encountering anything without explaining it to everybody nearby.
Adrien Brody's brief appearance as Salvador Dalí is another highlight. The rhinoceros conversation is ridiculous in exactly the right way, and the film is full of these short encounters that could easily have felt like celebrity cameos but instead become part of the fun of Gil's impossible night.
What I like most, though, is that the film eventually refuses Gil the easy answer. The lesson isn't that the past was disappointing or that nostalgia is foolish. The film clearly loves the past far too much to make that argument.
Instead, Gil learns that loving another period does not require living in it. He can admire Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cole Porter and the Paris of the 1920s without allowing that fascination to become an excuse for avoiding his own life.
That makes the ending especially satisfying. Paris remains romantic, the rain begins to fall, and Gil chooses to walk into a future he couldn't have planned at the beginning of the film. He hasn't stopped loving the past. He has simply stopped asking it to rescue him.
Perhaps that is also why the film has become increasingly personal to me. I return to Paris every year and inevitably revisit favourite streets, restaurants and memories. There is nostalgia in that, of course, but every visit also becomes something new.
Midnight in Paris understands that distinction beautifully. You can love the Paris that existed before you, remember the Paris you knew years ago and still remain open to the city that is in front of you now.
Cast and characters
Between the Paris that is and the Paris of Gil's imagination
Owen Wilson leads an ensemble divided between Gil's increasingly uncomfortable present and the writers, artists and dreamers he encounters after midnight.
Gil Pender
Owen Wilson
A successful Hollywood screenwriter attempting to become a novelist. Gil's love of Paris and fascination with the 1920s reflect his growing dissatisfaction with the life he has built for himself.
Adriana
Marion Cotillard
An alluring young woman within the artistic circles of 1920s Paris. Gil initially sees Adriana as part of his idealised past, before discovering that she too dreams of belonging to another period.
Inez
Rachel McAdams
Gil's fiancée, whose idea of their future is increasingly at odds with his own. Their time in Paris exposes how differently they see work, ambition, relationships and the life they are supposed to be building together.
Paul
Michael Sheen
An intellectual acquaintance of Inez whose confidence and endless explanations irritate Gil almost immediately. Paul is knowledgeable, self-assured and wonderfully incapable of allowing a subject to pass without offering an opinion on it.
Ernest Hemingway
Corey Stoll
Gil meets Hemingway in the Paris he has spent years imagining. Stoll plays him with absolute seriousness, turning his direct thoughts on writing, courage, love and death into some of the film's funniest exchanges.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tom Hiddleston
The celebrated American novelist is among the first people Gil encounters after his extraordinary journey into 1920s Paris, welcoming him into a world he previously knew only through books and history.
Zelda Fitzgerald
Alison Pill
Vivacious, unpredictable and immediately memorable, Zelda appears alongside Scott as Gil discovers that the legendary figures of the past had complicated lives of their own.
Gertrude Stein
Kathy Bates
The formidable writer and patron becomes an unexpected literary adviser to Gil, reading his manuscript and giving him something he has been desperately seeking: serious attention to his work.
Salvador Dalí
Adrien Brody
Brody's brief appearance transforms a conversation about Gil's predicament into an increasingly surreal discussion of rhinoceroses, perfectly suited to the artist he is playing.
Gabrielle
Léa Seydoux
A young woman Gil meets in contemporary Paris who shares his affection for the city, old records and walking in the rain. Her presence quietly points towards the possibility of a life rooted in the present rather than the past.
Carol
Nina Arianda
Paul's wife, who joins him, Gil and Inez during their time in Paris and becomes part of the contemporary social circle from which Gil increasingly retreats.
Museum Guide
Carla Bruni
A guide at the Rodin Museum who finds herself correcting Paul's confident account of the artist's personal life — one of the film's neatest small victories over his certainty.
Music and soundtrack
The sound of Gil's Paris
Jazz, French popular music and songs from the 1920s help move the film between contemporary Paris and Gil's imagined golden age. The music doesn't simply accompany the city — it becomes part of the reason he falls so completely under its spell.
Opening the film
Si Tu Vois
Ma Mère
Heard over the opening portrait of Paris, Sidney Bechet's recording immediately establishes the film's romantic relationship with the city. Before Gil's story has even begun, the music has already made Paris feel like somewhere remembered as much as somewhere visited.
- Composer
- Sidney Bechet
- Performer
- Sidney Bechet
- In the film
- Opening sequence
Cole Porter
Songs from the 1920s
Gil's first night in the past includes Cole Porter sitting at the piano among the Fitzgeralds and their circle. Conal Fowkes plays Porter and performs several of his songs for the film.
Conal Fowkes
Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)
One of Porter's most enduring songs becomes part of Gil's first extraordinary encounter with the artistic world he has spent so long idealising.
Conal Fowkes
You've Got That Thing
Another Porter song heard within the film's recreation of the social and musical world of 1920s Paris.
Conal Fowkes
You Do Something to Me
Porter's music reinforces the romantic atmosphere of the period Gil has spent years imagining from a distance.
Jazz and Paris
Music for walking through the city
Contemporary musicians playing in traditional styles sit alongside historic recordings, allowing the soundtrack to move easily between different versions of Paris.
Swing 41
Je Suis Seul Ce Soir
A French jazz performance that contributes to the soundtrack's relaxed, late-night character.
Original Paris Swing
Recado
Another modern recording performed in an older jazz style, helping connect Gil's contemporary Paris with the world he imagines.
Stéphane Wrembel
Bistro Fada
Wrembel's guitar-led piece has become one of the soundtrack's most recognisable contemporary recordings and fits naturally into the film's affection for Parisian jazz.
Josephine Baker
La Conga Blicoti
Baker's historic recording places a genuine voice of the period alongside the film's recreation of its legendary artists and performers.
The Belle Époque
Another golden age
When Adriana's own nostalgia carries the story further into the past, the music changes with it. Offenbach helps signal that Gil has entered somebody else's idea of the perfect Paris.
Jacques Offenbach
Barcarolle
From The Tales of Hoffmann, the familiar melody accompanies the film's move into Adriana's beloved Belle Époque.
Jacques Offenbach
Can-Can
The famous music from Orpheus in the Underworld continues the shift into the Paris Adriana regards as more exciting than her own time.
Also heard
More from the soundtrack
Parlez-moi d'Amour
Charleston
Ain't She Sweet
Ballad du Paris
Le Parc de Plaisir
I Love Penny Sue
Paris after dark
The music makes Gil's fantasy seductive before the film begins to ask whether living inside that fantasy would really make him happy.
Paris locations
The Paris Gil doesn't want to leave
Midnight in Paris moves through streets, gardens, museums, restaurants and landmarks across the city, using real places to make Gil's romantic idea of Paris feel almost irresistible.
The setting
Paris
Paris isn't simply the backdrop to Gil's story. The streets, cafés, museums, bridges and gardens are part of what makes another life seem possible to him. The film moves between the Paris he can actually inhabit and the Paris he has spent years imagining.
Rue Montagne Sainte-Geneviève
The street where a lost Gil sits after midnight and the mysterious vintage car arrives to carry him into 1920s Paris. It becomes the threshold between his present life and the past he has always wanted to experience.
Gil's midnight meeting pointPolidor
Gil encounters Ernest Hemingway inside this historic Left Bank restaurant. The scene turns one of Gil's literary heroes into a living, intimidatingly confident presence sitting across the table from him.
Gil meets HemingwayShakespeare & Company
The famous English-language bookshop near the Seine is a natural fit for a film whose central character measures so much of his life against the writers he admires.
Bookshop · Left BankMusée Rodin
Paul confidently disputes the museum guide's account of Rodin's personal life, allowing Gil to use some information obtained through his rather unusual access to the past.
Paul meets his matchMusée de l'Orangerie
Monet's monumental Water Lilies form part of the film's journey through the art and culture that Gil associates so strongly with France.
Monet's Water LiliesMarché Paul Bert
Gil discovers Gabrielle while browsing old records at the flea market. Their shared affection for music from another period gives him one of his first genuine connections within contemporary Paris.
Gil meets GabriellePlace Dauphine
One of Paris's most intimate historic squares appears among the locations that give the film its quieter, less monumental view of the city.
Île de la CitéPont Alexandre III
The ornate bridge provides the setting for the film's final encounter between Gil and Gabrielle as Paris begins to disappear into the rain.
Final sequenceQuai de la Tournelle
The book stalls along the Seine contribute to the film's portrait of a Paris where literature and history seem to remain visible in everyday life.
Seine book stallsSquare Jean XXIII
The garden beside Notre-Dame is used when the museum guide helps Gil translate information that has suddenly become unexpectedly important to him.
Notre-DameBeyond central Paris
Gardens and palaces
Gil's Paris extends beyond the city streets to two of France's most recognisable historic settings.
Monet's Gardens
Gil, Inez, Paul and Carol visit Claude Monet's gardens, where the ponds, bridges and planting connect the real landscape with some of the most familiar images in Impressionist painting.
Palace of Versailles
Both the palace grounds and the Hall of Mirrors appear during Gil and Inez's sightseeing with Paul and Carol, giving Paul another opportunity to display his apparently limitless knowledge.
Restaurants and nightlife
Dining through Paris
Restaurants are unusually important to the film's sense of Paris, from contemporary dining rooms to the places where Gil's encounters with the past unfold.
Polidor
41 rue Monsieur-le-Prince
Le Grand Véfour
Palais-Royal
Lapérouse
Quai des Grands Augustins
Maxim's
Rue Royale
Les Lyonnais
Restaurant location
Musée des Arts Forains
Belle Époque setting
A personal Paris
Few films make me want to revisit their locations quite like this one. In Paris, the distance between the film and the real city can sometimes feel remarkably small.
Awards and recognition
An Oscar-winning return to Paris
Midnight in Paris became one of the most acclaimed films of Woody Allen's later career, earning major nominations for the film itself, his direction and screenplay, as well as recognition for Owen Wilson's performance.
Academy Awards
2012 · 84th Academy Awards
nominations
Winner
Original
Screenplay
Woody Allen
Academy Award nominations
Four nominations, one win
Winner
Original Screenplay
Woody Allen
Nominee
Best Picture
Letty Aronson
Stephen Tenenbaum
Nominee
Directing
Woody Allen
Nominee
Art Direction
Anne Seibel
Hélène Dubreuil
Golden Globe Awards
Four nominations, one win
Winner
Best Screenplay
Woody Allen
Nominee
Best Motion Picture
Musical or Comedy
Nominee
Best Director
Woody Allen
Nominee
Best Actor
Owen Wilson
Musical or Comedy
BAFTA Film Awards
Original Screenplay
Woody Allen
Original Screenplay
Recognition
The screenplay turned Gil's romantic fantasy into something more lasting: a story about nostalgia, dissatisfaction and learning to live in the present.