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James Ivory’s Le Divorce is to sophisticated French romantic comedy what Renault’s Le Car is to top-of-the-line French automotive design. Adapting the modern-day Diane Johnson romance set in France, Ivory demonstrates once again (remember Slaves of New York?) that he’s far more convincing when working with a period classic like A Room with a View than with something fresh off the bestseller list. Is that because they wrote better books way back when, or simply because they had better clothes and furniture? Most likely it’s because Ivory is a superficial sensibility who when the material is closer at hand can’t pull off the illusion of depth. In this pseudo Jane Austen/Henry James bonbon, young American Isabel (Kate Hudson, convincingly artless) pays a visit to her stepsister Roxy (an uncharacteristically shrill Naomi Watts) in Paris only to find that Roxy’s worthless husband, Charles-Henri (Melvil Poupaud), has ditched her. So Isabel has an affair with Charles-Henri’s right-wing politician uncle (Thierry Lhermitte). How French! But in reality this is a film about art. Not only does Glenn Close (who looks as if she’d spent every day since doing Fatal Attraction boiling bunnies) make an appearance as a termagant poetess, but at the center of Roxy and Charles-Henri’s break-up is a property dispute over an old French masterwork — a painting of St. Ursula. What a filmmaker displays in his films as art sometimes gives you a sense of his own artistic values: St. Ursula looks like Kate Hudson as the Queen of Spades. In English and (just a touch of) French with English subtitles. (115 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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