Producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory, and their regular screenwriter-adapter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala seem to have a special affinity for Americans in Paris, the subject of three of their five most recent films—Jefferson in Paris (1995), A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries (1998), and now Le Divorce. The first of these is one of their worst features, while the second and third are among their best. So their special affinity doesn’t seem to matter as much as the quality of their material and their particular feeling for it. In the case of Le Divorce, their fidelity to the civilized attitudes of Diane Johnson’s novel makes this one of their most sophisticated and entertaining features to date.
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As Johnson has pointed out in interviews, Isabel is a deliberate update of a Henry James heroine—a plucky, single American woman, like Isabel Archer or Daisy Miller, who’s loose on the continent—and part of her witty point is that sexual and cultural norms have changed enough that an update is required. In some respects, her Isabel is as righteously innocent as James’s, but in other respects, including some of her attitudes about sex, she may be ahead of both her French lovers. Her practicality and ethics counterpoint those of Charles-Henri and his relatives, but Johnson is far too sophisticated and smart to see these motives as being in competition.
There is one deranged and rather unpleasant American in Johnson’s upper-crust universe—Tellman, an entertainment lawyer who’s the grief-stricken husband of Charles-Henri’s lover—but he’s so marginal to most of the action he can’t be said to belong to that universe (which is surely why he’s ejected from a literary reading when he raises a minor ruckus). He’s so out of place, in fact, that he’s never entirely believable; neither Johnson nor Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala knows quite what to do with him—or what to make of him—except use him as a piece of stage machinery.
And consider how the following paragraph gets adapted: “I learned… that if you drink a little tisane of orange and rosewater or mint, it perfumes your own juices. I feel I never would have found that out in Santa Barbara. I learned this French erotic secret from Janet Hollingsworth [an American friend], with whom Roxy and I had coffee one afternoon. ‘I’ve ferreted out a good one,’ she said. ‘Did you know that…?’ Quite a lot of tisane, though—a whole teapotful is required, she said.”
This is light satire that cuts two ways—ribbing both the French taste for hyperbole and the American dismay when confronted with it (which shows a less lofty hyperbole of its own). For me, the best reason to see this movie is that in the midst of her amusement Johnson feels sympathy and admiration for both cultures, and for all its glitz, the adaptation preserves and extends the same sentiments.
Directed by James Ivory
Written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Ivory
With Kate Hudson, Naomi Watts, Thierry Lhermitte, Leslie Caron, Melvil Poupaud, Glenn Close, Stockard Channing, Sam Waterston, Matthew Modine, Jean-Marc Barr, Nathalie Richard, Bebe Neuwirth, and Stephen Fry.
