We’ll have exactly what they’re having
Paris Can Wait will have you craving a glass of Bordeaux and an order of adultery to go
Eleanor Coppola’s Paris Can Wait celebrates a voracious, charismatic glutton, Arnaud Viard’s Jacques, an affable Frenchman of discerning taste and prodigious appetite, who seemingly went out of fashion with the rise of health-consciousness and temperance in food and drink. 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 five-course feast at a Michelin-feted 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 Michael, a film producer (Alec Baldwin), who can hardly wrench his ear from his cellphone long enough to exchange even pleasantries face-to-face. After a hectic week together at the festival in Cannes, the couple are bound for Budapest, where Michael must douse the flames of his latest project’s disastrous international shoot. When an earache grounds Anne before the flight, she decides to return home to Paris. Jacques, Michael’s colleague, offers Anne a ride.
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 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 left by him to languish.
Jacques, in his sensible, sanguine way, holds a liberal view of the situation: be true to your family, but indulge when necessary — an ethos that harmonizes 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, does much to bolster her leading man’s argument: the meals Jacques and Anne enjoy together she shoots in sumptuous glossy-magazine-spread fashion. The tenor of the film is so congenial you simply can’t help but root for adultery.
How could anything so pleasant be wrong? That’s the proposition Paris Can Wait luxuriates in for ninety minutes. By the end, you may decide there’s every reason to pursue happiness in this life — I, myself, darted to a nearby restaurant and promptly ordered a glass of Bordeaux.