It's difficult to tell how knowing, how tongue in cheek, Woody Allen is being in this film, from the familiar-to-the-point-of-cliche picture postcard montage that opens it, to the completely-in-love-with-Paris cinematography throughout, through the almost archetypally apt casting (Owen Wilson as a bumbling, wide-eyed American in Paris, Rachel McAdams his annoying, also American, fiancee, Marion Cotillard an alluring frenchwoman); possibly, the very question is beside the point, so immersed is the film in the Paris of cinema, art and the imagination, and so inseparable Paris from all of those facets of itself.
It's certainly not particularly substantial, but it ischarming, particularly the 1920s sequences, inhabited as they are by a series of scene-stealers - Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald, Corey Stoll hilariously doing Hemingway, Adrien Brody not far behind as Dali - and many pleasing others including Cotillard as the impossibly beautiful artists' muse, Kathy Bates as a sympathetically pragmatic Gertrude Stein, brief cameos from a befuddled Bunuel and cryptically matter of fact Man Ray, and roles of varying significance for F Scott, Cole Porter, Djuna Barnes, Pablo Picasso and sundry others. And for various reasons, some universal and others more personal, it made me feel a touch wistful, too.
(w/ C)
It's certainly not particularly substantial, but it ischarming, particularly the 1920s sequences, inhabited as they are by a series of scene-stealers - Alison Pill as Zelda Fitzgerald, Corey Stoll hilariously doing Hemingway, Adrien Brody not far behind as Dali - and many pleasing others including Cotillard as the impossibly beautiful artists' muse, Kathy Bates as a sympathetically pragmatic Gertrude Stein, brief cameos from a befuddled Bunuel and cryptically matter of fact Man Ray, and roles of varying significance for F Scott, Cole Porter, Djuna Barnes, Pablo Picasso and sundry others. And for various reasons, some universal and others more personal, it made me feel a touch wistful, too.
(w/ C)
