Midnight in Paris: Indulging the Ex-Pat Fantasy with Woody Allen

June 9, 2011  by Tory Hoen

Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris, is about – what else? Midnight in Paris! Inspired by her recent run-in with the director himself, Tory reminisces about how living the romantic, literary dream also means taking stock of the realities of life in the city of lights… -Geneviève

Film still from Midnight in Paris

“I don’t deliberately make a film a year, but that seems to be what happens,” Woody Allen told me when I caught up with him at an event last December in New York. “Eventually I will stop working or keel over, but so far everything’s been going along fine.”

At the time, he had just wrapped Midnight in Paris, which headlined this year’s Cannes Film Festival in May (and is now in theaters in France and the United States). I had been anticipating this film ever since my friend caught a glimpse of the crew shooting on one of the quais last fall, and I was curious to see how Allen would interpret (or misinterpret) Paris.

Pierre Guy, Confucion

In short, Midnight in Paris follows Owen Wilson’s character, an earnest American novelist, as he is unexpectedly lured into a magical world, populated by the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, T. S. Eliot, and the list goes on. Late in the film, a spin through the Belle Epoque has Wilson rubbing shoulders with Gauguin, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec.

Like many of Allen’s films, the whole thing was pretty far-fetched, but I must admit, it totally captivated me in the watching. More importantly, it made me laugh at myself—if only because it played with so many of the stereotypes that lure starry-eyed Americans (myself included) to Paris. Owen Wilson’s literary-inspired naïveté struck a serious chord with me. It’s no coincidence that when I first arrived, I named my blog A Moveable Beast in honor of the bohemian, writer-ly existence I planned to cultivate. Continue Reading »

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Iconic Paris: The Photography of Robert Doisneau

February 25, 2010  by Tory Hoen

“Le Baiser de l’Hotel de Ville” by Robert Doisneau

You may not know the name Robert Doisneau, but it’s likely that you’ve seen his iconic photographs of Parisian life in the ’30s and ’40s. If “Le Baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville” (see above) doesn’t make you want to hop a plane to Paris, I don’t know what will. But Doisneau’s oeuvre extends much further than the whimsical images we all know and love, and a current exhibit at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson allows us a window into the full breadth of his career, which spanned much of the 20^th century. Continue Reading »

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