The French are coming: as The Artist dominates the blogosphere, and the Cotillard and Poésy brigade moves from token Euro-flicks to globally-recognised projects, our love affair with the boho-Parisienne is flourishing. The city has endured as an icon of romance where sentiment dwindles elsewhere, amassing a list of high-profile dalliances to rival the Playboy mansion.

The Hollywood musical Gigi (1958), based on Collette’s novel of the same name, harks back to the hedonistic delights of the Belle Époque, as bon-viveur Gaston tries to woo the enchanting but childishly naïve Gigi. In a tale that testifies to the Hollywood cliché that love triumphs over everything, this musical romp invites the viewer to stroll like a Beaudelarian flâneur through the Bois de Boulogne savouring the visual feast of ‘Gay Paris’. The atmospheric pastel colouring of Metrocolor gives the footage an antique quality, like the hand-coloured photographs of yesteryear: stern monochrome superimposed with gaudy pinks and blues.

But in Paris even hanging out with the dead in Père Lachaise has a certain romantic cachet. Paris, Je t’aime (2006), a collaborative work by twenty-two directors including the Coen Brothers, is a kaleidoscopic anthology of eighteen short films about chance meetings, glances exchanged on the metro and ultimately, the enduring power of love. When this famous cemetery becomes the scene of a lovers’ spat, the relationship is saved by none other than Oscar Wilde, well, his metaphorical reincarnation. Writer, aesthete and all-round dandy, Wilde is one of the cemetery’s resident celebrities in an extensive list that includes romantic painter Delacroix, tragic lover Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust and more recently, singer Jim Morrison.

It seems then that in death, as in life, Paris has always been the muse of creativity, something Woody Allen’s latest release Midnight in Paris (2011) attempts to harness. This romantic comedy centres on the divergent ambitions between an inspiriting novelist, Gil, and his fiancée. Opening with a picture postcard montage of Paris, this fanciful film flirts with the city of love’s literary past by casting Gil inexplicably into the company of the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway and Stein, who even critiques his literary endeavour. Despite the fantastic premise, the beauty of this film is more in its potential than its realisation. Unfortunately this is little more than a cheesy American romcom superficially clad in nostalgia for a bygone era.

In contrast Les Amants du Pont Neuf (1991) is not about some rich American’s holiday but rather the desperate day-to-day existence of two young vagrants. Triumphing in inverting our associations of Parisian haute ‘culture’, this film boasts some amazing on-location footage such as waterskiing down Paris’ artery, the Seine. Mixing the harsh realities of homelessness, alcoholism and drug addiction, this film is a visually exhilarating story of amour fou, a wildly romantic love letter to Paris.

In the words of John Berger: “Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography… Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.”