Nominated for an Oscar in the Best Director, Film and Original Screenplay categories (having already won a Golden Globe for the latter), while the lead character is a Hollywood screenwriter given to insecurity, awkwardness and upsets of the heart,  it’s a welcome change not have  him played directly as a thinly veiled version of Allen himself. Indeed, it’s one of the film’s many strokes of inspiration to cast Owen Wilson in the lead, his familiar but bemused but unfazed by the world expression a perfect fit for Gil, a man struggling to complete his first novel, about a man who works in a nostalgia shop, in the face of the dismissive attitude of his self-absorbed fiancée, Inez  (Rachel McAdams), and her snobbily rich parents (Mimi Kennedy, Kurt Fuller) who don’t understand why he’s want to throw away a perfectly lucrative career for such daydreams.

They’re all holidaying in Paris, its reputation as a city of romance, art and culture underlined by the intoxicating three minute pre-credits sequence, an unashamedly picture postcard tour  of the city by day and night, in sun and rain, set to a dreamy 20s jazz soundtrack. It works its magic on the audience just as it does on Gil who, having spent time there in his younger days, dreams of moving back and living the 1920s bohemian writer life of his fantasies.

Bereft of any magic in her soul, Inez, unfortunately, is intent on moving to Malibu and is more impressed by her posturing pseudo-intellectual friend Paul (a wonderfully smarmy Michael Sheen) who, rather like the cinema queue guy pronouncing on Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall, is constantly pontificating about French art and history with a pompous authority, even to the extent of correcting a Rodin museum tour guide (Carla Bruni), that belies his total ignorance.

So, when he and his wife invite the couple dancing, Gil makes his excuses and goes off wandering the city streets. Getting lost, as the church bells chime midnight an old Peugeot pulls up and its occupants offer him a lift. And suddenly, Gil finds himself at a party in 20s Paris where meets F. Scott (Tom Hiddleston) and Zelda (Alison Pill) Fitzgerald while over on the piano Cole Porter serenades assorted ladies with his new ditty, Let’s Do It.

And so it goes as, night after night, Gil steps back in time as his new friends introduce him to the ebullient Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll) with his macho stories, who in turn takes him to the home of celebrated writer-poet Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) who offers to critique his novel.

It’s here he also encounters Adriana (Marion Cotillard, lovely), a fashion student and art-scene groupie (currently dating rising star Picasso after bedding Braque and Modigliani and now with her eyes set on Hemingway). Inevitably, Gil falls for her, but, just as he feels 20s Paris is where he was meant to be, so Adriana yearns for La Belle Époque and the days of Toulouse-Lautrec and Gaugin. Cue another journey into the past where, wouldn’t you know it, the Impressionists reckon the Renaissance was the best time to have lived.

It’s not hard to read Allen’s message about making the most of the present rather than living in the past, where the other man’s temporal grass is always greener, though, contradictorily, he does make all his yesterdays seems considerably more inviting and warm than the contemporary passages. Mind you, Gil’s meeting with Gabrielle, who runs an art collector’s stall in the local market, does turn up the heat a little.

There’s an amusing if slightly superfluous sub-plot in which Inez’s father hires a private eye (Gad Elmaleh) to follow Gil, only for the confused chap to end up in the time of Louis XIV and it does help immensely if you’re at least half as literate as Allen if you want to catch all the  in jokes and references, such as Gil giving surrealist film-maker Louis Bunuel the idea for The Exterminating Angel. But, while it’s hard to resist Adrien Brody’s scene stealing performance as Salvador Dali, at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter whether you know who Man Ray or Josephine Baker were, you just have to surrender to the sweet and unabashed romantic whimsy of the film’s mood and emotions. It won’t be difficult.