Midnight in Paris
In 2010, Gil Pender, a successful but creatively unfulfilled Hollywood screenwriter, and his fiancée Inez, are in Paris vacationing with Inez's wealthy, conservative parents. Gil is struggling to finish his first novel, centered on a man who works in a nostalgia shop. Inez dismisses his ambition as a romantic daydream, and encourages him to stick with lucrative screenwriting. Gil is considering moving to Paris (which he notes, much to the dismay of his fiancée, is at its most beautiful in the rain). Inez is intent on living in Malibu. By chance, they are joined by Inez's friend Paul, who is described as both pedantic and a pseudo-intellectual, and his wife Carol. Paul speaks with great authority but questionable accuracy on the history and artworks of Paris. Paul contradicts a tour guide at the Musée Rodin, and insists that his knowledge of Rodin's relationships is more accurate than that of the guide. Inez admires him; Gil finds him insufferable.
Gil gets drunk one night when Inez has gone off dancing with Paul and his wife, and becomes lost in the back streets of Paris. At midnight, a 1920s Peugeot Type 176 car draws up beside him, and the passengers, dressed in 1920s clothing, urge him to join them. They go to a party for Jean Cocteau, where he encounters Cole Porter, as well as Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald. Gil realizes (but doesn't draw attention to) that he has been transported back to the 1920s, an era he idolizes. Scott and Zelda, along with Cole and his wife, Linda Lee Porter, go to another bar, Chez Bricktop, where he sees Josephine Baker. At a third bar, Gil meets Juan Belmonte and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway offers to show Gil's novel to Gertrude Stein, and Gil goes to fetch his manuscript from his hotel. However, as soon as he leaves, he finds he has returned to 2010 and that the bar where the 1920s literati were drinking is now a laundromat.
Gil attempts to bring Inez to the past with him the following night, but she becomes impatient and peevishly returns to the hotel. Just after she leaves, the clock strikes midnight and the same car arrives, this time with Hemingway inside. He takes Gil to meet Stein, who agrees to read his novel and introduces him to Pablo Picasso and his lover Adriana. Adriana and Gil are instantly attracted to each other. Stein reads aloud the novel's first line:
Adriana says that she is hooked by these few lines and has always had a longing for the past, especially the Belle Époque of the late 1800s.
Gil spends each of the next few nights in the past. His late-night wanderings annoy Inez, and arouse the suspicion of her father, who hires a private detective to follow him. Gil spends more and more time with Adriana, who leaves Picasso for a brief dalliance with Hemingway. Gil realizes he is falling in love with her, leaving him in conflict. He confides his predicament to Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and Luis Buñuel, but being surrealists they see nothing strange about his claim to have come from the future, finding it to be perfectly normal. They discuss the impossibility of Gil's relationship with Adriana, and each of the artists envisages a different masterpiece inspired by such an unusual romance. Later on Gil suggests a movie plot to Buñuel - that of Buñuel's own 1962 film The Exterminating Angel - and leaves while Buñuel continues to question the plot idea.
In present-day Paris, while Inez shops for expensive furniture, Gil meets Gabrielle, an antique dealer and fellow admirer of the Lost Generation. He buys a Cole Porter gramophone record, and later finds Adriana's diary from the 1920s at a book stall by the Seine, which reveals that she was in love with him. Reading that she dreamed of receiving a gift of earrings from him and then making love to him, Gil attempts to take a pair of Inez's earrings to give to Adriana, but is thwarted by Inez's early return from a trip.
Gil buys earrings for Adriana. Returning to the past, he finds her at a party and tells Adriana, "I sense there are some complicated feelings you have for me." He takes her for a walk, they kiss, and he gives her the earrings. While she's putting them on, a horse-drawn carriage comes down the street, and a richly-dressed couple inside the carriage invite Gil and Adriana for a ride. The carriage transports the passengers to the Belle Époque, an era Adriana considers Paris's Golden Age. Gil and Adriana go first to Maxim's Paris, then to the Moulin Rouge where they meet Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Edgar Degas. Gil asks what they thought the best era was, and the three determine that the greatest era was the Renaissance. The enthralled Adriana is offered a job designing ballet costumes, and proposes to Gil that they stay, but Gil, upon observing that different people long for different "golden ages", has an epiphany, and realizes that despite the allure of nostalgia, any time can eventually become a dull "present", so it's best to embrace your actual present. Adriana however, elects to stay in the 1890s, and they part.
Gil rewrites the first two chapters of his novel and retrieves his draft from Stein, who praises his progress as a writer and tells him that Hemingway likes it, but questions why the main character has not realized that his fiancée (based on Inez) is having an affair with a pedantic character (based on Paul).
Gil returns to 2010 and confronts Inez. She admits to having slept with Paul, but dismisses it as a meaningless fling. Gil breaks up with her and decides to move to Paris. Amid Inez's pique, Gil calmly leaves, after which Inez's father tells her and her mother that he had Gil followed, though the detective has mysteriously disappeared. It is revealed that the detective found himself in the Versailles of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and is last seen fleeing from the agents of the State.
Walking by the Seine at midnight, Gil bumps into Gabrielle and, after it starts to rain, he offers to walk her home and they learn that they share the love of Paris in the rain.
comedy, boring, fantasy, stupid, whimsical, thought-provoking, magical realism, clever, psychedelic, philosophical, inspiring, romantic, entertaining