This nostalgia fills in his four-minute opening scene of tour in Paris, appears in Gil's fantasy novel, and defines every single character's longing. Woody Allen is biased: he left all the best cinematography for the country that loves him the most and poured his knowledge to live up to the title those people gave him—the last and only scholar in America. From Jean Cocteau to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, he must have done a huge amount of research on art and literature and exhaustively gathered all the important people who were in Paris over a century from 1850 to 1950, which uncoincidentally, contains the two "golden periods" in history.
Though, everyone in the movie, has the tendency to be dissatisfied with his present and crave for his own golden time, as a romantic, Woody Allen didn't pick him, or at least, didn't tell us about him. He merely told us, through Gil's words, that I just want my Paris in the rain.
Paris in the rain, what a brilliant idea! It represents an ultimate dream for simplicity and elegance. Versailles is glamorous, but royal splendor is just too sumptuous for an ordinary person; Rodin is talented, but Des Années Folles is just too French for a non-genius human being. Interestingly enough, Gil finally finds what he wants at Maxim's, where all those elites obtained their inspirations. No matter which era he yearns for , all he needs is Paris in the rain.
The movie ends abruptly, laying down the veil it just lifted. In a very witty way, Woody Allen asks each one of the audience a question: where is your Paris in the rain and what will you do when you find it? Undoubtedly, Midnight in Paris is the best of all his "La Belle Époque" city series.
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