Have you ever watched a film you consider highly entertaining only to wonder whether it is really a load of nonsense? But still entertaining.
That was the feeling I had at moments during Woody Allen's new romantic comedy, Midnight in Paris, which I saw - cheating: version originale (unlike the Sarko film which I stoically watched in French) - soon after its premiere at the Cannes festival.
So I cheated again and asked my elder daughter, who attended the festival in a new PR role, what the buzz was among critics. Genius or gloriously filmed tosh? The reply was that most thought it was Woody Allen back to his best.
The film opens with the most stunning sequences of Paris that I have seen. If Allen did not think to ask the City of Light's tourist people for a grant towards the cost of making of the movie, he surely missed a trick. Utterly spellbinding.
He then serves up a feast of clichés. The plot pits a dreamy American obsessed with the 1920s as Paris's golden age against his prospective in-laws, a horrendous money-driven couple with views to the right of Genghis Khan, and his fiancee (Rachel McAdmas), a dumb-smart and also money-driven blonde who just wants him to keep churning out hack scripts that pay well.
Dreamer finds a route to the past and finds himself rubbing shoulders with Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Picasso, Dali ... the list is long and impressive. And then the time machine whizzes us back to the Gay 90s.
In the end I found it impossible to dislike. The script is, at times, irresistible, the lines uttered by dreamy writer (Owen Wilson) sounding rather as if Mr Allen were speaking and meaning them himself.
Carla Bruni-Sarkozy? I am hardly an expert on film-making so have no idea how dreadful it really was that she took so many takes over the quite small scenes. But she sounds, looks and acts fine - as far as the somewhat limited role, as a cultural guide, goes - and there is nothing in her performance with which to take issue.
With more than a little help from the critical faculties of those around me, then, I declare Midnight in Paris to be innocent of the charge of being tosh, and well worth 100 minutes of anyone's time.
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