![]() In Allen’s film, the city is all beautiful surfaces, and so are the writers, artists, and musicians who made it what it was in the nineteen-twenties. It’s a love that Allen, who is far more sentimental about buildings and places than he is about people, clearly shares. A small, narrow street in Paris where there is no sign of anything having changed since the twenties serves the purpose of the Dakota, as the platform from which Gil Pender, the writer, makes his nightly journey into the past, although in this case he is propelled less by a fondness for this particular street as by a love of Paris itself. In the Allen movie the man doing the time travel is an earnest young screenwriter who is awed by the artists and writers who gathered in Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century, and who sees in them a purity of artistic purpose that is missing from his own life as a Hollywood hack. I thought of “Time and Again” when I saw Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” which is based on much the same conceit: the notion that if architectural surroundings are compelling enough, and you love them enough, they can bring you back to another time. ![]()
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