Post by StevePulaski on Oct 11, 2017 13:50:10 GMT -5
Paris Can Wait (2016)
Directed by: Eleanor Coppola
Directed by: Eleanor Coppola
Alec Baldwin and Diane Lane.
Rating: ★★
Life with the last name "Coppola" must be pretty nice, and that includes Nicolas Coppola's, who you'd know better as Nicolas Cage. With that last name, apparently any studio from the likes of A24 to Sony Pictures Classics is willing to dole out a formal distribution path for your mostly shallow, exhausting affairs while continuing to shortchange and turn-down original screenplays from aspiring artists with something to say.
If you're Roman Coppola, of course you can make a Charlie Sheen vehicle called A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III, free to make it a maddeningly incoherent mess and market it via posters that substitute the film's title for an unexplained banana clip-art. If you're Sofia Coppola, you get the cream of the crop with films like Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled, but you neglect to take those ideas further and seem to be let off the hook thanks to the arresting capabilities of your gauzy visual style.
Finally, if you're Eleanor Coppola, the 81-year-old wife of Francis, director of classics The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, you can take a break from directing a host of strong documentaries to make your narrative debut. In turn, you get to make the slightest of travelogues that boasts about French cuisine while being as light and as airy as a quarter pounder (or a royale with cheese, if you must).
I, too, am surprised at my modest contempt for a film about two characters meandering around the outskirts of Paris, sharing softly romantic moments and indulging in the finest foods. Hours before watching Paris Can Wait, I actually caught the first forty-five minutes of Sideways, one of my favorite comedy-dramas, on TV and laughed at all the parts I've laughed at since first seeing it several years ago. The film is nearly the same thing, only Alexander Payne's drama takes place in wine country and involves two men embarking on several vineyards, one engaging in infidelity on the eve of his wedding. The film has urgency, but it also has compelling drama, focusing on two hopelessly lost men stuck in a vicious cycle, one marginally satisfied and one consumed with self-loathing and doubt. It's not too dissimilar from Clerks, but now I'm really getting off base.
The film stars Diane Lane, a woman far too talented for this kind of basic business, as Anne, who is visiting Cannes with her movie-producer husband Michael (Alec Baldwin). As the famous film festival draws to a close, the two need to return to Paris but a delayed flight proposes a setback. The two decide to fly on a private-plane, but the pilot suggests Anne doesn't fly due to an ear infection. Instead, she takes up the kind services of Michael's amiable partner Jacques (Arnaud Viard), who offers to embark on the roughly seven-hour commute with her by way of his stylish car. Michael is too busy barking into his cell-phone to think anything of the impromptu arrangement, and thus Anne and Jacques begin their trek across the gorgeous French countryside.
Ostensibly stopping to eat at every French restaurant in town, Anne and Jacques eat like the King and Queen, indulging in crème brûlée, escargot, and a barrage of cheeses, while exchanging flirtatious glances. Anne also somehow takes photographs with a vacation camera that look like snapshots for The New Yorker. The pedantic qualities of their trip are not undercut when the two address the inevitable romantic undertones, especially given Michael caring so little about his wife's whereabouts as their trip lasts the better part of two days. But Coppola never feels the need to capitalize on any kind of relationship or real chemistry between the two leads. She instead goes on making an impossibly incredulous piece of light-hearted fluff that celebrates privilege as well as the conversations few people would have and the expenses few would even have the means to make.
There are moments of contrast in the ways Jacques responds to setbacks and the idea of traversing Budapest and surrounding areas as opposed to Anne's very American (not necessarily ethnocentric) attitude, but these moments hardly highlight anything besides vague details of their thin characterization built around their respective homelands. For a good portion of the first leg of the trip, you'd believe you were watching one of Eleanor Coppola's documentaries as opposed to her first scripted endeavor. The film plods along from one restaurant to another like a marathon of a well-produced Food Network program (to cinematographer Crystal Fournier's credit) and all the gastronomic fatigue without the preceding pleasure.
Paris Can Wait certainly does make us, like its titular city, wait for something noteworthy to happen or the arrival of an interesting plot. Even an exciting conversation bearing some human interest would do. But instead, we are left in the company of two severely underwritten characters and a lot of pretty locales for too long and far too often.
Starring: Diane Lane, Arnaud Viard, and Alec Baldwin. Directed by: Eleanor Coppola.