Infidelity on the menu

Paris Can Wait

On my way to an earlymorning press screening of Paris Can Wait I was by some charmed coincidence reading A.J. Liebling’s reminiscences of French gastronomy, Between Meals, which includes this marvellous account of the dining habits of legendary gourmand Yves Mirande: “In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin,” Liebling writes, “M. Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of fileted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot.”

I say by coincidence because it happens that Eleanor Coppola’s picture shares with Liebling’s chronicle precisely the same subject: a voracious, charismatic glutton, an affable Frenchman of discerning taste and prodigious appetite. Liebling lamented that this sort of edacity went out of fashion with the rise of health-consciousness and the temperance in food and drink it sternly advised — he describes Mirande and his dinnertime regime with almost mythological enthusiasm, as if he’d been the continent’s last serious eater. But in Arnaud Viard’s Jacques he is happily reincarnated.

Coppola imagines this mirthful man as gloriously insatiable: on the roads of the south of France he dines with ardour and abandon, savouring escargot and quaffing extravagant wines, as deeply gratified by a spontaneous roadside picnic as by a fivecourse feast at a Michelinfeted brasserie. He eats and drinks incessantly. Coppola, like Jacques, relishes every sip and every bite.

Jacques is also a ravenous romantic. He seems especially so to Anne (Diane Lane), the hero of the film, whose time in the fellow’s company — first reluctant, eventually enamoured — is buoyed by a sybaritic holiday thrill. Anne, in her early 50s and moderately satisfied with life, is married to a film producer (Alec Baldwin) who can hardly wrench his ear from his cellphone long enough to exchange even pleasantries with a person face-to-face. After a hectic week together at the festival in Cannes, the couple are bound for Budapest, where the husband must descend with “a very large fire extinguisher” to douse the flames of his latest project’s disastrous international shoot. But when an earache grounds Anne before the flight, she decides instead to skip the trip and return home to her apartment in Paris. Jacques, another producer and a colleague of her husband’s, offers Anne a ride.

And a memorable ride it proves. Paris Can Wait takes the shape of a 30s screwball comedy, one in which an evidently mismatched man and woman begrudgingly endure one another on a cross-country adventure until affection at last conquers discord. Because Anne is married, the tension of course derives from the threat of infidelity: Coppola wants to explore whether a woman in the throes of a stagnant marriage may be morally justified in looking elsewhere for gratification, and the film poses serious questions about what it means for a wife to remain faithful to her husband when she is languishing dissatisfied herself.

Jacques, in his sensible, sanguine way, holds a liberal view of the situation: be true to your family, but indulge when necessary — an ethos quite in harmony with his love of fine wine and food. Anne, as she learns to quench her appetite and yield to the country’s vast culinary pleasures, considers the argument. The object of the film is to determine whether she agrees.

Coppola, while not prescriptive about it, does much to bolster her leading man’s argument: the meals Jacques and Anne enjoy together she shoots, with Girlhood DP Crystel Fournier, in sumptuous glossymagazine-spread fashion, the effect of which ought to impel the most abstemious moviegoer to dash to the nearest bistro immediately upon leaving the theatre. The tenor of the film, meanwhile, remains so congenial throughout that one simply cannot help but sympathize with the adulterous position — it really does seem a harmless, beneficial thing, conventional mores be damned.

How could anything so pleasant be wrong? That, in short, is the proposition Paris Can Wait invites one to consider, and indeed to luxuriate in for 90 minutes. By the end one may find there’s every reason to pursue happiness in this life — I myself darted to a nearby restaurant and promptly ordered a glass of Bordeaux. ∂∂∂