When James Ivory first began writing the screenplay for “Le Divorce” back in January 2001, Franco-American relations were just dandy. What could have seemed more agreeable than adapting Diane Johnson’s piquant novel about two American stepsisters in Paris learning life lessons the French way? Now with the film’s release it’s difficult not to start getting downright metaphorical about “Le Divorce.” A young American poetess is left by her French husband for the Czechoslovakian wife of an American lawyer — just how far does that translate to a global perspective? Fortunately there are still some level-headed world citizens left, among them Ivory himself.
The urbane American director, now 75, maintains that the current round of frosty relations will not take long in thawing out. So what may to some people’s eyes look like a divorce is actually nothing more than a lover’s tiff. In fact Ivory is confident Americans still have a great deal to learn from the French and vice versa. “There’s always been this mutual attraction between the French and the Americans, it’s an old, old thing, it goes way, way back 200 years. I think the French have probably been surprised at our passions, about how we feel for them. Why do we come here in droves? It wasn’t just because in the early 20th-century it was cheap; people didn’t come here for that reason they came because it was a more liberated, interesting kind of atmosphere: liberated in the arts and liberated in life, sexual and so forth — and that’s why people came here and have always come here. It’s a contrast to the way things are in America, that’s why Americans have always come and will always come.”
“Le Divorce” introduces us to Isabel Walker (Kate Hudson) a flighty young lady from Santa Barbara who comes to Paris to support her heavily pregnant stepsister Roxy (Naomi Watts). The timing is serendipitous as Roxy has just been ditched by her aristocratic French husband Charles-Henri. Isabel though isn’t the type to sit around holding her sister’s hand when she could be off practicing her French pillow talk. Cue... a comedy of manners, which reveals among other things: the peculiar logic governing French divorce; the interior of many of Paris’ best restaurants (Isabel has an affair with a charming, moneyed rogue expertly played by Thierry Lhermitte), and of course the insider’s guide to tying a “foulard.”
Ivory for one remains convinced that certain aspects of French culture could be effectively exported to the United States. “It could be superficial things like learning how to dress and things of that kind,” he says. “But it could also be learning a more dispassionate way of looking at things, a slightly more cynical and ironic way, instead of our own quite emotional jumping in.”
Evidently, this is still something beyond many American film critics, judging by some of their reactions... Knee-jerk accusations of stereotyping are perhaps to be expected but this doesn’t make life any easier for an intelligent filmmaker trying to convey the various forms, which cultural conflict takes. It must be said that Ivory and longtime writing partner Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have stayed pretty faithful to the content and tone of Johnson’s novel (certainly Johnson seems to think so). As in the book there’s a running joke about American woman’s impulsiveness and her French counterpart’s capacity for cold logic. Where though were the accusations of stereotyping when Johnson’s novel first appeared in 1997? Needless to say, they were nowhere to be seen.
“I wondered about these reviews that said we had not shown Paris well. Well what kind of Paris were these critics thinking about, what kind of Paris? I just have no idea,” says Ivory.
Ivory’s idea of Paris is indubitably that of a well fed and watered expat — he continues to live between Paris and New York with partner and producer Ismael Merchant — and this isn’t within reach of everybody. Maybe that’s the problem here but then we’re talking Merchant Ivory here not the gritty working class realism of a Ken Loach.
Ivory’s relationship with France stretches back to 1950 when he first went to stay with French family friends in Normandy. “I came with the idea of enrolling in the IDEC [the French cinema school] and to do that you had to become very fluent in French but before I could do that the Korean War started, and all the students like myself had to go back to the United States and make sure that we were in school otherwise we would have been drafted into the army in Korea,” he says. “Everybody did it, we were the first unpatriotic generation of America, up to that time everyone happily went to war smiling but not in that war that’s the one where attitudes changed. A lot of American fathers said I’m not having my sons going to Korea, that kind of thing, and they would do anything to keep their sons out of it. So I went back, but I did go into the army, I didn’t go to Korea; I was drafted to Germany instead.”
I’m intrigued to know why Ivory wanted to come to France to learn about making films when the 1950s were a golden period for movies in the United States. “It seemed to me that the film schools in the States weren’t very good. By then I’d seen a few French films and I thought there would be an attitude about cinema, about movie-making that I would respond to better for some strange reason than I would in America.”
Certainly, a glance at Ivory’s filmography tells its own story. Films about modern American society don’t feature. American social codes are loose and chaotic, not easily buttoned up in a starched white shirt; Ivory’s films tend to tackle more conventional, socially defined societies be they French, Indian or British, even occasionally period American as in the case of “Mr & Mrs Bridge.” That’s why “Le Divorce” fits so neatly into the Ivory cannon and it isn’t, as some might like to have it, to everybody’s taste. It’s rather bourgeois, slightly old-fashioned and not at all subject to fluctuations in taste.
