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A Fox release. Written by James Ivory and Ruth Prawer-Jhabvala; directed by James Ivory; starring Naomi Watts, Kate Hudson, Matthew Modine and Thierry Lhermitte. Released to DVD on January 27, 2004.  Le Divorce marks several intriguing firsts for the revered Merchant/Ivory (and Prawer Jhabvala) production team. Le Divorce is set in the present day and it utilizes computer-generated images. Unfortunately, despite possessing these more mainstream attributes, there were no additional efforts to bring any other more traditionally positive Hollywood qualities to the project. Not every film has to follow the same set of guidelines, but it becomes hard to defend a movie that doesn't seem care about its own characters, has no real plot line and isn't particularly concerned with character arcs. Naomi Watts stars in Le Divorce as Roxanne de Persand, an American poet living in Paris with her husband, Charles-Henri (Melvil Pourpard), and her small daughter. As the movie opens, Roxeanne's younger sister, Isabel (Kate Hudson), arrives in Paris to visit her sister only to find Charles-Henri leaving Roxanne for another woman. This event starts the ball rolling and Le Divorce continues with Roxanne preparing for the unpleasant aspects of her divorce, Isabel's starting an affair with a fifty-something frenchman (Thierry Lhermitte), the uncovering of a million dollar painting and a lovesick American man (Matthew Modine) chasing after Roxanne, among other sub-plots.  Le Divorce is a strange filmmaking choice for the Merchant/Ivory team. This isn't because of the contemporary setting but because Le Divorce is a very plot driven work. If there is one constant throughout Merchant/Ivory's previous works it’s that the films are almost uniformly fine character driven works. Adapted from Diane Johnson's popular 1997 novel of the same name, so much plot is crammed into Le Divorce's nearly 120 minute running time that it leaves little time to give the multitude of main characters any sort of depth. This becomes especially problematic given that the majority of screen time is given to Roxanne and Isabel, two characters whose defining traits are self-pity and flightiness, respectively. The impact of this is doubled with the introduction of supporting actors like Sam Waterston, Leslie Caron, Roman Durais, and Modine whose ever-so-small roles seem as though they would be far more interesting to watch than the two leads. When writing her book, Le Divorce, Johnson saw it as a comparison of French and American ethics, habits and societies set against the backdrop of a divorce. Like Frances Mayes' tangentially (or rambling) Under the Tuscan Sun, this is the type of thing that can work incredibly well on the printed page, but that becomes horrifically hard to translate to the silver screen. Director Audrey Wells' succeeded to some degree with her adaptation of Under the Tuscan Sun by scrapping the soul of Mayes' work and injecting her screenplay with a traditional plot structure. Screenwriters Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and James Ivory (who also directed Le Divorce) ignored this style of adaptation and attempted to make Le Divorce a grouping a scenes with reoccurring characters that both told a story and examined the differences between French and American cultures. The result of this divided goal was, as one might imagine, a muddled combination of both that didn't come close to satisfying either aim.
chris neumer yes, it's true: Diane Johnson, the author of the book Le Divorce, also wrote the screenplay for The Shining. |
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