Three years after taking us to Barcelona, Woody Allen brought us to Paris, in one of his most beautiful films yet. Midnight in Paris is another movie that feels like completely new territory for Allen, and yet the impressions of nostalgia and fictitious romance pervade the story enough for us to be reminded that this is the same progression of ideas he’s been working on for the last 40 years. The movie is the first in a while in which Allen uses some strange magic realism to transport the Owen Wilson protagonist character back to Paris in the 1920s, the most magical place for a writer to visit. It conveys the ambivalence of his previous films regarding romance, that it’s an invigorating experience that is fine to enjoy, but best appreciated with the consciousness that it’s not real, an illusion that we return to again and again to create meaning for an existence that doesn’t offer us any in itself.
Blue Jasmine is set for release soon. It’s impossible to know for sure how well it will be received, how much Woody Allen fans or casual moviegoers will enjoy it, or what precisely it will be about. However, it’s probably safe to assume that in some capacity it will engage with these same issues and philosophical concepts that Allen has been working out on screen for decades. It will probably have some corny humor and some keen human observations. And if it’s no good, it’ll just be another year of waiting until he tries again. As reliable as clockwork, it seems. But Woody Allen still finds a way to surprise. Let’s see what he will predictably surprise us with next.