Scr(i)pt
Where Film Begins

JAMES IVORY ON LE DIVORCE
( From Script to Screen )
By David S Cohen

There's no way around it: We Americans just don't seem to understand the French. Nor they us, for that matter. Sure, we've taken turns pulling each other's marrons out of the fire over the last couple of centuries. The United States probably owes its existence to the intervention of the French in the American Revolution, and American troops repaid the favor in two World Wars.

Yet America and France too often behave like mismatched lovers; the attraction is undeniable but the more time we spend together, the more we drive each other crazy. Yes, France helped free America from the British Empire, but it is Britain, not France that enjoys a “special relationship” with its American cousins. And oui, America led the liberation of France from German occupation; but when America went to war with Iraq, France stood with Germany (!) against the U.S.-led coalition.

The result: rising anti-Americanism in France and an American backlash against all things French. Almost all things, anyway – Vivendi-owned Universal Studios and The Hulk seem immune. But when people are changing the name of French Fries to “Freedom Fries,” and doing it with a straight face, not even the green-skinned goliath is safe.

Into this furor strides a contemporary comedy of manners, Le Divorce, that takes a gentle poke at the mutual bafflement that ensues when Americans and Frenchmen try to live together. Based on the 1997 novel of the same name by Diane Johnson, the story of two American girls in Paris and their romantic adventures and misadventures now resonates far on a level that neither Johnson nor the film's writers, James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala could have intended.

It's no surprise to find humor as the Americans share their feelings and the French stand on ceremony. It all seems to echo Henry Higgins' quip in My Fair Lady: “The French don't care what they say actually, as long as they pronounce it properly.” And the film even features what amounts to a French reply: Leslie Caron laments of the American girls that “they don't care about form, it's all about their feelings.”

The irony is that it's hard to imagine Jacques Chirac saying something similar about George W. Bush – which is a tribute to Diane Johnson, says the film's co-writer and director, James Ivory. “Those observations of Diane Johnson are perfectly valid, whether there's any sort of contretemps between the United States and the French or not. Those kinds of truths are there in our relationship with the French.”

A Fox Searchlight release scheduled for release on August 8, Le Divorce is the 33rd production, including three for television, from the partnership of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, all but 10 made in collaboration with writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. It stars Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts as California-bred sisters Isabel and Roxy Walker.

As the story begins, we find Roxy married to a French painter, Charles-Henri Persand (Melvil Poupaud), with a young daughter at home and another baby on the way, Isable, just out of college, comes to Paris to help Roxy, only to find that Charles-Henri has just abandoned her. As Roxy struggles, first to reclaim her marriage, then to survive the divorce, Isabel plunges into Parisian life, going to work for famous American ex-pat writer Olivia Pace (Glenn Close) and becoming the mistress of Charles-Henri's Uncle Edgar (Thierry Lhermitte), a married diplomat many years her senior.

To complicate matters further, an heirloom painting, which Roxy had brought to Paris from Santa Barbara, turns out to be very valuable, perhaps an original by Georges de La Tour, and under French law it must be part of the divorce settlement. Wose, the American husband of Charles-Henri's American mistress begins stalking Roxy. By the time the story reaches its climax on the Eiffel Tower, murders, a suicide attempt, and an unexpected windfall each play their part in the story.

The film features a strong supporting cast including Leslie Caron as Susane, the Persand family matriarch; Sam Waterston and Stockard Channing as the Walker parents; Bebe Neuwirth as an art buyer from the Getty Museum and Matthew Modine as the cuckolded husband.

OFF THE RADAR

The rights to make Le Divorce took a roundabout route to Merchant-Ivory. “Such things must happen this way for lots of people; it hasn't ever happened to me like this,” Ivory told scr(I)pt by phone from his apartment in New York. He first heard of Johnson's novel from a review in the International Herald Tribune. He was in Paris at the time, working on A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. “I went to a bookstore, the very bookstore where in the novel the riot takes place,” he recalls. “I bought it and read it and liked it. I tried to find Diane Johnson and it turned out that she was at CAA, which is where we are, so it was easy to get a meeting with her. She was in Paris and we met.”

It turned out that the rights to Le Divorce had been snapped up by another company, Radar Films; a director was already attached and Johnson had just turned in her first draft.

“Years passed, but we stayed friendly with Diane Johnson,” says Ivory. “In fact, she lives on our street in Paris, just a couple of doors down.” When Radar Films couldn't get the project off the ground, they turned to Ivory. “But I said I wanted our own script. The script they had for the other production wasn't my sort of thing. I wanted to do my own.

“I didn't want it to be so heavily slanted away from the French. I wanted to bring out the French point of view. There's a lot of humor in that. It's there in the novel. It's there in the French character. I wanted to do more with that than had been done in the other script. I just wanted to put that into a better balance, at least a better balance for me.”

TWO WAYS OF WORKING

Once he had secured the chance to develop a new script, Ivory enlisted long-time collaborator Jhabvala. (Jhabvala, who generally does not do publicity for her films, declined to be interviewed for this story.) The pair have written together many times, but they have two distinct approaches to their work flow, depending on who's taking the lead on the script.

“If it's a script that she's writing on her own, without me, she basically does the first draft,” says Ivory. “She shows it to me and we go back and forth an awful lot, and I say, ‘ I think there should be this or it should be that,' et cetera et cetera. She's very good at adjusting to what I consider my needs, though she's very sure of herself. If I ask for something [which] seems to her to be completely wrong, I don't get it; and I have to live with that. That's the nature of our relationship.

“But when we work together, then the way we work is I do a draft first rather than she. I do the first draft and she doesn't go back to the book; she works from my draft and does things she wants to do. She straightens out the things that are wrong in my draft, adds things and invents things. That's how we worked on this [Le Divorce]. We then sit down together and go over it line by line, and it takes its final shape.”

AN EXTRA DIMENSION

Ivory started out making documentary films and in some ways he's never lost a documentarian's interest in bringing unfamiliar worlds to an audience. “I think it's there. I always think it's there,” he says. “When I'm making a feature, I'm presenting information that's of interest to me and to the audience. I find myself doing that. And I approach fiction sometimes with a documentarian's eye for detail. Just dishing out information.”

Ivory had always liked the book Le Divorce and the world it portrayed. He had known French families like the Persands and had been intrigued by how they lived. Byt most of all, he was drawn to the story by something simpler: He liked Roxy.

“I thought she was an extremely interesting character, and we hadn't anyone quite like her in one of our modern films. …A girl who was a writer and came from a background like that, who had a hysterical streak in her, who is also sort of a politicized kind of person, and who is mad at turning herself into a Frenchwoman. Which is an impossibility. She cannot. No foreighner can. We've had types like that in our Indian films, where there is a kind of high-spirited and intelligent English girl who throws in her lot with the Indians and comes to grief. Byt we'd never done that with an American girl. And she was a writer, which was interesting because it's an extra dimension.

“I liked Isabel, too, but I preferred the story of Roxy, which is really the story that's told in the film, more than Isabel's story.”

THE FRENCH WAY

For those who haven't followed the careers of Merchant and Ivory closely, this film may seem a bit of a departure. They're better know for films set in India, including Heat and Dust and Shakespeare-Wllah, and for period films, such as Howards End and A Room With a View. But the stronger thread in Merchant-Ivory films isn't any particular setting but, rather, an interest in what happens when people from different cultures encounter each other. “English or Americans landing in France or India or Italy, an thing, usually romantic, happen to them,” says Ivory, summing up that thread; and in that respect, Le Divorce is a perfect fit for Merchant-Ivory, both because of Roxy's marital difficulties and Isabel's adventures.

One cultural tension in the story is simply that Roxy and Isabel are California girls, used to charing their feelings and expecting them to be heard. But in Paris, they find themselves in a culture where form matters; there is a way of doing things, that's how it's done, and that's that.

So Roxy's encounters with the French approach to divorce, in which form seems to be so important, become especialy exasperating for an American audience. To an American sensibility, it seems as if the French are more interested in form than morality. But that's not true, says Ivory, “They have an intellectual construct for justice and morality which is all their own. That you could say is the French way. Sometimes yes, it throws you for a loop.”

YOU CAN'T ALWAYS GET…

Comparing the script with a second draft, dated September 2001 (Ivory says the actual date was 9/11/01, but the date was taken off the script), the story is substatially the same, though much was changed, as usual, from the early draft to the final edited cut. Many of those changes came from simple practicality.

Isabel's affair with Uncle Edgar plays differently than it was intended to, for example, because of casting problems. In the book and the screenplay, Edgar is 50 years her senior – a charming womanizer but over 70. In the film, he's middle-aged, but probably 20 years younger than the character on the page, so the affair does not seem quite as odd as it was originally meant to be.

“We were never able to find a really old French actor who spoke very, very good English and was charming, and in the right class, and good-looking and still in good shape. We could never find anybody like that, so we had to go with a younger actor. That whole aspect of it was interesting to me. That was one of the biggest jokes in the whole story, the affair between Isabel and Uncle Edgar. A young girl in her 20s falling in love with a powerful, old, French, almost-faschist, eminence-grise type of 70 years old. It's not the usual storyline, and that appealed to me.”

Another change came because a key loacation was unavailable. The book's climax is set at EuroDisney. The name was changed to “USA Dream” for the screenplay;; but in the end, neither EuroDisney nor Paris' second-biggest theme park, Asterix Park, gave permission to shoot there, so the scene was moved to the Eiffel Tower, which is suitibly famous but carries a somewhat different meaning.

There was a similar change in one of the film's early scenes. As Roxy shops for vegetables, just before Charles-Henri leaves her, a shopkeeper tells her that in the 17th century, asparagus was thought to be bad for women's reproduction. In fact, says Ivory, that was true of cheese, not asparagus, and the scene was originally to have been at a chese shop. But the cheese shop was closed the day they went to shoot, and the vegetable stand was open. So cheese's bad rap fell on asparagus.

More importantly, though, says Ivory, “It's the only time we see here happy. It's before the husband's left; it's the only moment we have; she's buying it for her husband, who adores it. So, in that sense, it's before the scales fall from her eyes in the next scene.”

Losing the cheese shop may have also taken away a small bit of setup for a later scene. Late in the story, the Walker and Persand families sit down to lunch at the Persand estate. As Roxy launches into an announcement about the painting, the Persands interrupt: There's something wrong with the cheese. Servants are summoned; the cheese is replaced, but the luncheon breaks up. Roxy's announcement goes unfinished.

A ruse to change the subject? Insensitive rudeness? “It is about the cheese,” says Ivory flatly. “It has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Roxy is about to raise the issue of the picture. It's just about the cheese. They're all in their own conversations. But at the moment the cheese tray goes around, that's so much more important than any sort of topic of conversation.”

ACTORS SHOULD CONTRIBUTE

Ivory and Jhabvala use one unusual technique, one we've never encountered in anyone else's script. Instead of scripting all the character's responses, a scene description sometimes says, “She might agree” or “He might say ‘this is good.'” In effect they provide the sense of a momen; but where the line is more or less a throwaway, they leave the actors room to improvise the dialogue.

“You ca do that when it's a contemporary film,” says Ivory. “If you're doing Henry James or E.M. Forster, you don't do it. You write out every last word because people are not good at making up dialogue on the spot in the style of Henry James.

“But if it's moder, you want your actors to contribute. If they're smart, there's a good chance that they're going to come up with very good lines on their own.

“Improvised action is one thing, and you can do that in any kind of film, whether it's a period film or a modern film. Improvising dialogue is something you can only do in modern films.”

THE DUSTBIN OF HISTORY

By the time the August release of Le Divorce rolls around, the Iraq War and its tensions will be well behind us; and the euphemism “Freedom Fries” will become linguistic trivia, like “Alsations” for German shepherd dogs (when all things German were bad, during World War I) and “Redlegs” instead of “Reds” for the Cincinnati baseball team (when all things red were bad, during the Cold War).

At least, that's what James Ivory thinks. “By the time the film comes out, that will be forgotten,” says Ivory. “When the Englishman from Christie's says, ‘Everything is worse when the French are involved,' that will get a big laugh for maybe a month or two, then it will be forgotten. I don't think it's a serious thing. Chances are when the film comes out, the French will be our allies again; and everybody will have forgotten the nonsense about Freedom Fries and throwing bottles of champagne into the rivers of Georgia. At least I hope.”

But even if he's wrong, that may not spell trouble for Le Divorce. Balanced it may be, but the French and American culture clash, and the way the American girls triumph, in their fashion, may play very well with Americans these days. Even the ones who love their “Freedom Fries” but wouldn't be caught dead eating pommes frittes.

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