France and us: Vive la différence

France and America have been mutually bewitched, bothered and bewildered ever since Benjamin Franklin went to Paris and admired its women. Not long after, Alexis de Tocqueville sailed to the States and returned the compliment.

That initial attraction ripened into a mythic love-hate affair spawning a rich literature of cultural difference. Mark Twain and Edith Wharton amused readers merely by noting the American penchant for straightforwardness and the French for indirection.

So it is with Le Divorce, James Ivory's deliciously droll film inspired by Diane Johnson's tragicomedy of manners about an American in Paris who firmly refuses to dissolve her marriage to a philandering Frenchman.

Roxy (Naomi Watts) has a young daughter and is pregnant again when her spouse, Charles-Henri (Melvil Poupaud), abandons her for a performance artist. He decamps just as Roxy's kid sister, Isabel (Kate Hudson), arrives from America to help out.

Ivory has great fun contrasting Roxy's gloom with Isabel's glow. As Roxy grows increasingly disillusioned with France and how pragmatic the French can be about a romance that is not their own, her sister is completely suckered by the illusion, becoming the mistress of Charles-Henri's uncle Edgar (played with snaky grace by Thierry Lhermitte).

In this series of supercharged encounters between old world and new, Roxy despairs that what Americans find tragic the French find comic. The reverse is also true. Ivory tickles laughs from the spectacle of Isabel, who has only a casual acquaintance with etiquette and foundation garments, suddenly developing an interest in constricting social conventions and lingerie. While to Americans this is the stuff of hilarity, these are subjects that the French treat with unusual gravity. (Similarly, French find talk of sex amusing and talk of money taboo while the film suggests the reverse is true for Americans.)

Moviegoers of a certain age will appreciate the irony of Leslie Caron, who once railed "I don't understand the Parisians!" in Gigi, cast as the personification of the City of Light here. As the chatelaine and matriarch Suzanne de Persand, Roxy's formidable mother-in-law, Caron wears her pearls like armor and wields her false smile like a lance.

If her daughter-in-law cannot fathom Mme. de Persand's sangfroid in the face of her son's faithlessness, neither can the latter understand how Roxy and Isabel get through life with such a surplus of feelings and such a deficit of self-control.

In the puckish view of this Merchant Ivory production view (Ivory cowrote the adaptation with longtime collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Ismail Merchant produced), given the strained Franco-American relations, the only good thing between the two nations is the Atlantic.

One who adroitly straddles both continents is Olivia Pace - Glenn Close in a coif that resembles shoulder-length iron filings - an American author long a resident of Paris. In one sprightly sequence paced like MTV's House of Style (pretty radical in a Merchant Ivory film!), Olivia delivers an illustrated mini-disquisition on the French.

In this episodic film with a soupcon of Sex and the City (just as the Merchant Ivory Slaves of New York presaged the HBO hit), cross-cultural misunderstanding, not character, is the point. Watts and Hudson are lovely, their golden tresses haloing the film in a L'Oreal nimbus. But they never emerge, as do Caron and Lhermitte, with contours of personality both velvety and sharp.

As with its source material, in its last act Le Divorce fitfully veers into melodrama, a development that Ivory treats with admirable discretion. In his hands the eternal meeting of American innocence and European experience is not a bone-crushing collision but a gentle collusion. Vive la différence!

Contact movie critic Carrie Rickey at 215-854-5402 or cricket@phillynews.com.

Le Divorce *** (out of four stars)

Produced by Ismail Merchant and Michael Schiffer, directed by James Ivory, written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Ivory, based on the novel by Diane Johnson, photography by Pierre Lhomme, music by Richard Robbins, distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures. In English and French with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 55 mins.

Isabel Walker. . . Kate Hudson

Roxeanne de Persand. . . Naomi Watts

Edgar Cosset. . . Thierry Lhermitte

Suzanne de Persand. . . Leslie Caron

Olivia Pace. . . Glenn Close

Parent's guide: PG-13 (sexual candor, discreet violence, profanity)

Playing at: Ritz Five and Ritz Sixteen/NJ