A
FOREIGN AFFAIR
Two
American sisters abroad lose their hearts in Merchant Ivory's
exhilarating comedy of cross-cultural romance.
www.Elle.com - Karen Durbin reviews.
 One
of the best-dressed characters in Le Divorce, a deliriously
stylish new comedy from Merchant Ivory, is a purse. Not an
ordinary purse: The object that hangs so conspicuously from
Kate Hudson's shoulder and eventually flies over the rooftops
of Paris is an Hermes Kelly bag in eye-popping red crocodile.
Hudson plays a bright, young Californian named Isabel, and
the bag is a gift from her married French lover, Edgar (Thierry
Lhermitte), an aristrocratic politician-philosopher who likes
to give his mistresses Kelly bags at the start of an affair.
Alarmed to see Isabel naively wearing hers all over town,
Edgar tries to urge discretion. But he can't very well explain
why, so he suggests instead that the bag is right only for
certain occasions. Puzzled by his stuffiness, Isabel asures
him that his gift is so special, it goes with everything.
Culture
clash and the vagaries of sexual passions are comedy's meat,
and Le Divorce makes a feast of them. But like the Diane Johnson
novel it's based on, James Ivory's deceptively ambitious movie
has more on its mind. This particular clash of cultures isn't
just a matter of French versus American – although those
details provide much of the movie's fortuitously up-to-the-minute
humor (the worldly Edgar would give Donald Rumsfeld apoplexy).
Not for nothing does Johnson open her sotry with an epigraph
from Henry James and name her heroine after Isable Archer
in Portrait of a Lady. The still-vital conflict in James'
great novels of Americans in Europe is that of young versus
old (the U.S. was barely 100 when he started publishing),
innocence versus experience, and the passionate, often tragic
attraction between the extremes.
High
on the beauty of Paris and buoyed by an insouciant French-pop
score, Le Divorce feels featherlight. But it acknowledges
the gravity of love as well as the game. Hudson must comfort
her heavily pregnant older sister, Roxy (Naomi Watts), whose
spoiled brat of a husband – Edgar's nephew – has
dumped her for another woman. As one sister's sentimental
education advances (with Edgar's tutelage wryly amended by
an earlier mistress, a suavely witchy Glenn Close), the other's
marriage heads toward dissolution. Confronted with this double
crisis, the French clan gathers to exert damage control and
to protect its interests. Isabel and Roxy's family (Sam Waterston,
Stockard Channing, and, doing a hilarious deadpan turn, Thomas
Lennon as the deliciously obtuse brother) join the fray when
events take a dire turn.
Money and class loom large in
this Jamesian story, most amusingly when Roxy's heirloom painting
of Saint Ursula – the leader of 11,000 virgins who were
martyred when they refursed marriage – becomes part
of the property battle. And while you can't help being dazzled
by the elegant aristos, you hate them a little, too, never
more than at a wincingly funny luncheon party where the families
face off for the first time and the Americans' muscular feistiness
is no match for the exquisite condescension of their hosts.
Few directors could resist turning a scene like this into
a big comic showpiece, but Ivory's touch is at once lighter
and more merciless. What makes Le Divorce such rich comic
filmmaking is its restraint. Beneath the movie's exuberant
surface lie a tart realism and more than a hint of melancholy.
Roxy's increasingly haggard face reminds us that love hurts
– before the movie ends, it will also kill. There is
romance in this comedy, but love isn't a solution so much
as a tantalizing problem: What is divovce, after all, but
the ultimate, mortifying proof of its perishability?
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