Woody Allen’s jaunt across the pond for 2011’s Midnight in Paris is a charming ode to cultural nostalgia that managed to charm millennial audiences enough to earn the prolific director his fourth Academy Award while becoming his most financially successful film to date.
A whimsical meditation on longing for the always-out-of-reach good ol’ days, the film follows a disenchanted Hollywood screenwriter, Gil (played by Allen’s perhaps most amiable stand-in, Owen Wilson), as he embarks upon a dream-like journey through an impeccably shot 1920s Paris. Gil encounters a who’s who of Jazz Age icons, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Cole Porter. While those idealized interactions with some of the most loved members of the Lost Generation are pure fantasy, many of Allen’s artistic and literary allusions are squarely rooted in reality — if delivered with a wink and a nod.