‘Paris Can Wait’ is long, dull journey
It’s not often that a sincerely made, completely uncynical film should turn out to be awful, but that’s the case with “Paris Can Wait,” the narrative feature debut from Eleanor Coppola.
Coppola, who has shown a sure hand as a documentarian — she made the superb “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse” in 1991 — has turned in a poorly acted, colossal bore of a film that strikes wrong notes from beginning to end.
Part naive travelogue and part abortive romance, it’s the story of woman, Anne (Diane Lane), who is beginning to feel neglected by her husband, a big shot producer played by Alec Baldwin. Through a mix of circumstances, she winds up going on a road trip with one of her husband’s colleagues, a flirtatious Frenchman named Jacques (Arnaud Viard). Because Jacques wants to seduce her, a ride that should have lasted a few hours is stretched into several days — several very, very long days.
It’s only in the opening minutes that “Paris Can Wait” seems to offer hope. Eleanor Coppola, who is married to Francis Ford Coppola, knows something about what it’s like to be married to a movie mogul; and in these early moments, there is the sense of looking behind the curtain. As the producer, Baldwin exudes authority and charisma — he just glows with power — and we watch the movie hoping to watch him for a while.
Yet even in these early scenes, a tin-eared quality emerges. Anne and her husband are in Cannes; and the movie suggests, through Lane’s plaintive little glances, that all is not well. And maybe it isn’t. But it’s hard to feel too sorry for someone in a luxury suite, whose husband has apparently abused her by taking her to the French Riviera.
Then just as the movie is already beginning to sour, Baldwin disappears, never to return. We’re left with Lane at her most self-conscious and mannered, playing a woman so boring that her most interesting character note is that she does Sudoku; and with Viard, who is considerably less attractive than Baldwin. I realize not everybody knows French actors, but Yvan Attal, who was originally announced for this role, would have made more sense — he’s playful and complicated. Casting Viard as a seducer would be like casting Kevin Spacey in that role. Good actor, wrong energy.
And so they drive. And we’re tied up in the back seat and forced to listen to them talk. Eleanor Coppola’s screenplay is entirely without subtext. The characters say exactly what they’re thinking, and what they’re thinking simply isn’t interesting. I suppose two things were intended to keep audiences in their seats — our desire to see how things work out between Anne and Jacques, and its travelogue of Provence and Burgundy.
But you would have to be an indiscriminately curious person to care anything about Anne or Jacques, together or separately. There’s no sexual magnetism and no spiritual connection between them. There’s also nothing at stake. Anne’s marriage isn’t bad, but isn’t so good either. Jacques, supposedly a ladies’ man (hard to believe), seems neither like a short-term thrill nor a long-term prospect. Everything is lukewarm.
As for the travelogue, we see a building here and a building there. The travel information is basic. I suppose because the characters never stop eating, the movie can be called a gastronomical exploration, but it’s more a flaunting of wealth.
When Anne tells Jacques that her vice is chocolate — of course, it is; an interesting vice is not possible for this character — he orders every chocolate dessert in a high-end restaurant and she takes a little nibble out of one or two. They also order multiple bottles of the best local wine and have a sip of each, then leave the rest on the table. The movie wants us to see them as epicures, but they’re really just rich people, plowing through everything, valuing nothing.
About halfway through, a sense settles in that something is bound to happen, that it can’t just keep going like this, with one town, one meal and one dull conversation after another. But “Paris Can Wait” does keep going, and it never gets better.