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Kate Hudson's lively personality (and exquisite lingerie)
is not enough to save Merchant-Ivory's Le Divorce.
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Producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory lighten up with Le Divorce, an adaptation of Diane Johnson's 1997 novel about modern-day Americans living in Paris, and the result is a lulling romantic comedy that claims half the intelligence and emotion of their better-known period dramas.
Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts are the pretty blonde American sisters at the center of the film and the focus of entanglements with the men of a wealthy French family. Isabel Walker (Hudson) comes to Paris to help her pregnant sister, Roxy (Watts), but ends up having an affair with Roxy's married, older brother-in-law (Thierry Lhermitte).
As Roxy, a pregnant poet deserted by her handsome painter husband, Charles-Henri de Persand (Melvil Poupaud), Watts shows none of the spark from her career-making dual performance as the would-be actress Betty and the embittered Diane in David Lynch's 2001 film Mulholland Drive.
Comic bits and melodramatic moments are tossed around with abandon. Screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a longtime Merchant-Ivory collaborator, unloads enough subplots to fill 10 soap opera episodes but has little luck breathing life into the film.
Watts' character is the target of the film's clumsiest, most overwrought moments, and she's battered mercilessly by Ivory's desperate attempts to get an emotional reaction from audiences. Roxy is a thankless character, and Watts has too much promise to be handcuffed with thankless characters, no matter how prestigious the production.
Hudson smiles gamely through the mess, but the fact is that she has smiled through too many messes -- Alex & Emma, The Four Feathers, Dr. T & the Women -- in her young acting career. She works hard at making Isabel, a carefree, ex-college film student, spontaneous and lively as if it's her sole responsibility to keep Le Divorce from being entirely haughty.
Early in the film, Isabel is shown how to mix with precision the classic French cocktail of Ricard and water. Later, she models the most exquisite lingerie. Hudson sparkles as Isabel, because no film, not even one as pretentious and fashion-fixated as Le Divorce, can completely extinguish her lively personality.
Ivory wants Le Divorce to be sexy, and he solely relies on Hudson to give the film its between the sheets zest. She dresses fashionably and cuts her trademark blonde ringlets into a stylish French bob that makes her wide smile stand out even more. Hudson is a pretty pixie, and Le Divorce receives an energetic boost each time Isabel joins one of her two Parisian lovers. Hudson is also charismatic, but not enough to make Le Divorce worthwhile.
Bebe Neuwirth, Leslie Caron, Sam Waterston and Stockard Channing fill out the ensemble of familiar faces with little impact. Matthew Modine is especially wasted as a jealous husband whose violent actions lead him to the top of the Eiffel Tower. A red Hermes handbag plays a more significant role than any of these actors.
Like most Merchant-Ivory films, Le Divorce is an upper-class fantasy. There is an absence of racial color in Le Divorce, as if all the ethnic groups of Paris were asked to leave during the making of the film.
Roxy's French in-laws gather around the family's sprawling country chteau. The Walkers may only be an American upper-middle class family from California, but they claim a valuable La Tour painting as a family heirloom.
Early into Le Divorce, you sense how Ivory and Jhabvala want the film to be brainy. Instead, it packs the smarts of a glossy magazine advertisement, which means it's not smart at all.
Le Divorce is the most bourgeois drama you'll ever see, more so than recent Merchant-Ivory movies, The Golden Bowl and The Mystic Masseur. In Le Divorce, pretty postcard scenes involving haute cuisine and the various ways French women tie their scarves stand in for drama.
The real-life soap opera of current American politics has made France an enemy of Homeland Security and the ongoing War Against Terrorism. So I welcome any film celebrating the Parisian joi de vivre. Yet, Le Divorce is too stiff and stuffy to truly appreciate Paris.
Le Divorce opens at a time when the image of British film is worlds apart from Merchant-Ivory genteel dramas. The stand-out British films are 28 Days Later and its zombie horror; Bend It Like Beckham with its female soccer players and the illegal immigrant heroes at the heart of Dirty Pretty Things.
Hudson does her best to peel away the dull, middlebrow sensibilities in Jhabvala's script but there's no overcoming a film obsessed with fashion design and food on the plate. Hudson offers drama and comedy, but Le Divorce is a movie meant for mannequins.
CityBeat grade: D.
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