Four films set in London, one in Barcelona and he's just finished shooting in Rome: that Woody Allen sure gets around.
If you miss the title, you won't wait long to see where the freshest fruit of his Grand Tour is set. It opens with a moving slide-show, set to
jaunty accordion music, naturellement, of all the postcard sights of the City of Light. Allen showers us with cliches as if daring us to think that Paris cannot transcend them. The problem is that his film doesn't.
His real masterstroke is the casting of Wilson in the lead role. His goofily charming Gil Pender is the best avatar yet of the wide-eyed romanticism that lurks beneath the world-weary exterior characters Allen usually plays in Allen films. Tentative and self-effacing, lovably neurotic, he's the perfect American in Paris.
Gil, who's a hack screenwriter in Hollywood and working on a novel, is on holiday with his puddle-shallow fiancee Inez (McAdams), and her Tea Party Republican parents. When they bump into an old flame of Inez's (Sheen), Gil decides to cut loose and walk the streets.
As midnight strikes, he watches in amazement as a 1920s Rolls-Royce pulls up at the kerb and its occupants beckon him aboard. The seriously spoiler-averse should skip to the penultimate paragraph.
