HOLLYWOOD, 6 September 2003 — For some, Paris is Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe — an embarrassment of touristic riches interspersed with strings of baffling words and encounters with equally baffling food and drink. Of course, it’s possible to get past the merely iconic, the postcard cliches to discover a city pumping with vigor, teaming with Epicurean pleasures and populated by women whose fetishistically knotted scarves remind one that the author of “The Story of O” was — “naturellement” — French.
Despite the suggestiveness of those knots and the ubiquity of lingerie stores not everything in Paris is redolent of sex. More than a few corners are redolent with the waste of thousands of beloved “chiens” and worse — racism, nationalism, Le Pen. Along with the cacophony of ringing cell phones, the whooshing roller-bladers and flanking ghettos this is the Paris that most tourists turn a blind eye to, but that now helps shape the city’s topography. Alas, neither this Paris nor the intoxicating Paris of history is much in evidence in James Ivory’s banal adaptation of Diane Johnson’s novel, “Le Divorce,” a film in which the City of Light’s seductions and perils are as dimmed as the novelist’s point and purpose.
At once a “bildungsroman,” a comedy of manners and a shrewd read on American-French relations, Johnson’s fizzy romance traces how a young University of Southern California dropout, Isabel (Kate Hudson in the movie), matures from callow Californian to womanly Francophone. Having gone to Paris to care for her pregnant sister, Roxy (Naomi Watts), Isabel stays to discover her inner Gigi. Her un-sentimental education involves haute cuisine, haute couture and, more crucially, bouts of sleeping with “L’Oncle Edgar” (Thierry Lhermitte), a conservative pundit who’s her uncle by marriage and old enough to be her grandfather. At least that’s the case in the book, where he’s 70 and, as Isabel swoons, his white hair and vigor make her feel as if she were with the greatest man on earth — or racy words to that effect.
Filmmakers always make sacrifices when they adapt books to the screen but it’s too bad Ivory and his longtime collaborator, writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, shaved 20 years off Edgar’s age. The youthful looking Lhermitte wasn’t out of his 40s when “Le Divorce” was shot and looks nothing like the Zeus-like figure of the novel. The five-decade gap between Johnson’s lovers invests their affair with undeniable “frisson,” while saying something about Isabel’s character and furnishing the story with a useful metaphor. Isabel falls for Edgar not because of his snowy mane, but because the years have crowned him with experience, adventure and masculine prerogative she finds exciting. He’s a blast from the European past and when the American falls into his arms she’s also falling into the seductive embrace of another culture.
For all our French jokes and their sneers about our McCulture, suggests Johnson, the United States and France are as linked by history and shared values as Isabel and Edgar are bound by pleasure. Ivory doesn’t seem to think that his audience is as open as Johnson’s readership to this lesson; either that or he believes moviegoers have no use for politics.
What a drag he didn’t give us a chance to prove him wrong.
In the film, all Isabel learns is how to brew a special tea, walk in high heels and order her meals in French. We, in turn, learn that Hudson is as bland a screen presence as ever, that Leslie Caron has held up nicely and that Watts, an actress with a dangerous talent, can do no wrong.
We get, in other words, the tourist’s version of Johnson’s book — a room with an obstructed view.
