Diane Lane should wait for a better movie
Paris Can Wait is very lucky to have Diane Lane as its star. The story of an underestimated woman who is awakened by the romance of provincial France is very much in the lane of Lane — the 52-yearold previously got her groove back in films such as Under the Tuscan Sun and Nights In Rodanthe.
In Paris Can Wait she plays Anne, the wife of self-involved Hollywood producer Michael (Alec Baldwin in a barely glimpsed role) who accepts a ride from Cannes to Paris from her husband’s French producing partner Jacques. But Jacques stretches the nine-hour drive into a languid two-day jaunt of nonconsensual tourism, during which Anne learns to let her hair down (like, she literally takes the elastic out).
Lane plays Anne with elegance and grace, even as she is given the thankless job of playing barely bottled impatience and delivering variations on the line, “Now we really must get to Paris!”
Built into the DNA of the story is how Anne needs to let go of her overly scheduled North American life and embrace the French way of spontaneous picnics and mid-road-trip wine breaks. But it’s hard not to sympathize with Anne’s lowsimmering resentment toward Jacques as he holds her hostage on the mansplaining tour through the south of France that no one asked for.
The role of Jacques calls for equal parts sweet and swagger and France’s Arnaud Viard strains to make the audience swoon. Neither the character nor the actor have the charm that the film needs to serve up a believable temptation for Anne.
Between the pastoral scenery and beautifully styled French food, Paris Can Wait does at least deliver some passion in its visuals, a credit to first-time feature writer and director Eleanor Coppola. The 81-year-old won an Emmy for Hearts of Darkness, the behind-the-scenes documentary of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s fraught Heart of Darkness shoot, but she proves herself to be a frustrating storyteller in her narrative film debut.
Perhaps worst of all are the limited expectations Coppola has for her own heroine. It’s hard to love a movie where a woman finds herself from the passenger seat.