Midnight in Paris

Writer-director Woody Allen's biggest box-office success is his latest (2011) European confection, Midnight in Paris. The English title gave it a romcom tilt, but the French title may have better suited Allen's intentions (and customary egocentric genre), Monsieur Le Souris (Mr Mouse).

Once again facing up to reality, the veteran American auteur employs a substitute for himself in the leading role of a weak-willed questioning American intellectual. This time, it's Owen Wilson, who fits the bill very well, and he's a Hollywood screenwriter and wannabe novelist visiting Paris with his fiancee (Rachel McAdams) and her parents.

As always, guest stars flock to Allen's sets because he does give them the chance to have a little fun for a good cause, which is Allen's special aura. The French have long adored, and his long opening sequence of a host of picture-postcards shots of Paris, from the air, by day, in the rain, by night, illustrates his love of the French capital and its romantic and artistic history.

Wilson starts his visit in 2010, meeting an arrogant American academic (Michael Sheen) showing off to a Parisian museum guide (Carla Bruni, aka Mme Sarkozy). Rejecting his US-centric fiancee's worldview, fretting about his novel, tipsy and wandering Wilson is whisked away, after the peals of midnight, by a vintage Peugeot driven by F.Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (more Brits, this time Tom Hiddleston and Alison Pill). Transported back to the 1920s, he meets practically tout le monde, from Cole Porter to Bunuel to TS Eliot and Picasso.

After further historical-name-dropping scenes, a movie-goer is doubly challenged when the significance of the painters, writers and personalities is not clearly spelled out at the same time was the audience is trying to recall who is who among the fast-tracked parade of international up-and-coming stars of stage and screen. Only Kathy Bates (as Gertrude Stein) and Marion Cotillard (as one of Picasso's mistresses) shone in this latest Allen version of cinematic charades.

At one stage, when Bates/Stein was also talking in French and Spanish, the game was nearly risible. I don't know of the actor who played Hemingway dourly, and Adrian Brody's Dali failed to register at all. When Wilson and Cotillard found themselves horse-and carriaged back to the 19th Century Belle Epoque, meeting its great painters (including an inevitably small cameo for Toulouse-Lautrec) at Maxim's restaurant, the game ended for me.

Maybe the high box-office takings were accounted for by returnees eager to catch all the names that were dropped, all the talents that were employed on the screen. They possibly helped some viewers to overlook the fact that Allen had given Wilson woefully unwitty and non-cerebral dialogue, while getting him to walk, talk and comment off-screen a la the older Allen who cineastes worshipped for good brain-tickled reasons. This younger Allen is a boring mouse, and there may be a good reason: Allen wanted all the Parisian residents of the past to declaim their aesthetic ideals and ambitions with an historical passion no 21st-Century Hollywood hack (Wilson's screen character) would dare to pen. Or else Allen doesn't want to create a version f himself that's both younger and just as clever.