Film: 'Non' thanks

Like that dumb blonde you randomly picked up at a party last weekend, Le Divorce has sex appeal on the surface, but leaves a lot to be desired underneath.

A Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Diane Johnson's novel of the same name, the film casts itself in the guise of a clever comedy of manners on social differences between the French and the American. Instead, it comes off as just mannered--as in put-on and artificial.

Isabel, played by the ever-perky Kate Hudson, arrives in Paris to help out her pregnant sister Roxy just as her French husband leaves her for another woman. How an intellectual like Roxy, a poet, ended up with a spoiled mama's boy incapable of choosing his own underwear is never clearly explained. And that's fitting for Le Divorce, a film not nearly as concerned with character motivation as with the frilly environment its characters occupy.

Didn't Ivory get the memo? People are more interesting to watch than accessories! A pretentious red crocodile Hermès handbag (a gift to Isabel from her sugar-daddy) serves as the focus of half the film's scenes? It's too much. The film's carnal obsession with pretty details--a teacup's floral design, a wee lapdog, a rainbow umbrella--is so overwhelming, the film might have been directed by a bored housewife disguised as John Ivory.

As Isabel's expatriate employer, Glenn Close is the embodiment of Ivory's fascination with the little elements we're supposed to find charming and revealing. When Close gushes about the way that French women wear their scarves, the viewer gets the sense that the sequence is supposed to be ironic--a charmed, revealing valentine to American stereotypes of the French. But without precision, irony falls flat, and that curse seems to plague the directors in Le Divorce throughout the film.

Overall, the cultural pretensions of Le Divorce boil down to a few highlights of American and French societies that are about as stimulating as a cheap vibrator. The French like cheese--the Americans mispronounce the French language; it's not revolutionary stuff. As refreshing as it is to see Americans once again focus on the French in a manner that excludes the notion of "freedom fries," Le Divorce is merely a decent story that gets lost in clumsy frivolity. At least Kate Hudson looks trés chic.