Le Fromage
Ah, Paris — City of Light, of Love, of Liver Damage and Lung Cancer. C’est formidable, non? Who in need of a posh vacation would turn down the opportunity to luxuriate in its finest hotels, to stuff oneself with sumptuous snails, to work on a terribly flat romantic drama called Le Divorce? As it turns out, nobody.
In the nearly two-hour Le Divorce (based on the popular novel by Diane Johnson), Kate Hudson bobs around being her cutesy, one-note self as horny tourist Isabel Walker while Naomi Watts — who at least tries to take her role beyond the hairstylist’s chair — portrays her freshly dumped, pregnant sister, Roxeanne de Persand. Both blondes hail from Santa Barbara, so among the actual French people — who, curiously, inhabit large portions of France — the sisters have much to discover. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the audience.
Despite wearing its pseudoliterary trappings on its sleeve with a Balzac reference here and an Emerson quote there, this new effort from producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory (Howard’s End) can’t be called pretentious. But some typical stuffier-than-thou tripe would have been to its advantage. Instead, the movie’s uglyish Americans in Paris mingle with the locals until all the characters end up seeming vaguely despicable.
The plot is complicated and cliché-laden. Perky Isabel arrives in Paris intent on proving that she’s the opposite of the meek Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady. She crosses paths with Roxy’s pouty husband, Charles-Henri (Melvil Poupaud), who immediately ditches Roxy and their proplike daughter to go boink a hyperactive Russian freak named Magda (Rona Hartner), who in turn has ditched her insane American husband, Tellman (Matthew Modine). Basically, everything involved has something to do with relations between the golly-shucks Walker family and la famille de Persand, a model of bewildering Gallic arrogance. What we learn from their interactions is that Americans are cheap and stupid, and the French are greedy and stupid. Here’s your New World Order.
Among the characters who show up to distract us from the inherent dullness of the primary players, Glenn Close does her best Susan Sontag as women’s-lit champion Olivia Pace, a part pitched much closer to Jenny Fields from Close’s big-screen debut in The World According to Garp. There’s also a subplot involving a possibly valuable painting of Saint Ursula, long an heirloom of the bumbling Walker family (Stockard Channing, Sam Waterston, Thomas Lennon) but now mixed up in the divorce proceedings with the snooty de Persands (Samuel Labarthe and the legendary Leslie Caron). Bless that painting — it affords us a couple of brief scenes with the inimitable Stephen Fry (as a British art appraiser) to temporarily lift us from the stale melodrama.
At a luncheon party midway through Le Divorce, Leslie Caron discovers that the Beaufort has fouled and instructs her guests to avoid consuming the bad cheese. I issue a similar warning.
