Culture Clash

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Lost in translation, found in adaptation: midsummer in the city offers two distaff variations on the slap and tickle of the perspectival shift: making time to try to see it someone else's way. There's fussing in Le Divorce -- the Merchant-Ivory adaptation of Diane Johnson's bestselling novel -- where two sisters from Santa Barbara submit love American style to French masters; and fighting in Freaky Friday -- Disney's remake of the 1976 standard -- where a mother and daughter get a taste of Chinese fortune. Life is very short, and there's no time, so I will sum it up: Can they work it out? Maybe, yes, and it will fall apart before too long.

Le Divorce, despite its ballyhooed sourcework and redoubtable cast, opened small last week -- just two theaters in all of New York. Pretending to be a quirky commentary on cultural conflicts, it drags and pulls across the unhighlighted Parisian landscape as if against its will, dulling the city of lights into cardboard backdrop and flattening romance, relationships and intrigue into an absence of dimension. I do not expect it to open wide on word of mouth alone.

Kate Hudson plays Isabel Walker, a free and easy Santa Barbaran bumpkin babe arriving from across the pond to help out poet sister Roxy (Naomi Watts), with one child in hand and another on the way, on the very day Roxy's husband Charles-Henri (Melvil Poupaud) is moving out. (The film means to side with the Americans, but 5 minutes with Watts' Roxy and one's sympathies shift naturally to Charles-Henri -- it's amazing the poor man's lasted this long.) Explanations and monologues on French idiosyncrasies ensue (they say "of course" to everything, prefer sugar cubes to granules, and are creative with scarves).

As Charles-Henri's motivation -- an adulterous love affair with an adulterous love more annoying than Roxy -- becomes known, Roxy moans and whines a poor, poor, pitiful moi leitmotif, refusing divorce at all costs, while Isabel, in sisterly support, beds in turns a young French radical (Romain Duris, adorably unwashed) and an old French conservative (Thierry Lhermitte, seductively stately and no less appealing than he was 20 years ago in Until September) and becomes sophisticated. More explanations and monologues on things French follow (including useful tips on how to snag a red croc bag from Hermes, or to sweeten one's natural juices with a pot of tisane--herbal tea--before making love).

Isabel is mentored in politics and perception by American expat authoress Olivia Pace (Glenn Close), in whose footsteps she follows, while Leslie Caron, as de Persand matriarch and mother-in-law to Roxy, slyly, snidely, gallicly holds down the French fort. In the meantime, the unresolved marital split brings five more Americans into the picture -- the Walker parents, Margreeve (Stockard Channing) and Chester (Sam Waterston), attorney-brother Roger (Thomas Lennon III, of A Guy Thing and How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days, stealing every scene he's in), a Getty museum curator interested in an unimpressive but meaningful painting (Bebe Neuwirth), and the husband cuckolded by Charles-Henri and apparently trained for response by late-night made-for-TV movies (Matthew Modine, badly misdirected). This provides an opportunity for more cultural conflicts and witty insights (consider the sexism of French law, the absurdities of French politesse, the double tipping in French restaurants).

It's hard to make Paris seem uninviting and sexual explorations tedious, but Merchant-Ivory manage it here. The plot, much pared down from the o'erpraised book on which it is based, remains nevertheless as overstuffed and facile as the Franco-American (uh-oh) comparisons upon which it relies. The changes made from page to screen do a certain injustice to the characters (having Isabel make the first move on the statesman misses the cultural point, for example, as do the extended indiscreet discussions on the Hermes bag). Hudson and Watts turn in barely mediocre performances, their failings made all the more palpable by the far stronger performances of just about everyone else who graces the screen. And the direction is, in total, simply stodgy, with a quick and dirty resolution that is entirely unpersuasive and unsatisfying. Unnecessary, even. I am persuaded that if the film had broken in the middle, irreparable, the audience would have left just as well, feeling just as sated, not caring a damn for what they might have missed, and even forgetting where they were by the time they reached the door. I hope the French don't judge us by this.

Freaky Friday is somewhat more successful. Engaging one of the few conflicts more volatile than that of the French and the Americans, the relationship of mother and daughter, it replays the now familiar role reversal of its originals (the Mary Rodgers 1972 novel and the film version starring Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster) with a modern edge and a sardonic wit, while remaining decidedly Disney.

Stressed and harried, with pre-wedding jitters, mother/psychiatrist Dr. Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis) does not have patience for her late-sleeping rock-guitaring contrary teenaged daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan). Anna, of course, has troubles of her own -- an English teacher who's out to get her, an ex-best friend who's out to get her, a little brother who's out to get her, and a mother who's remarrying too soon after her father's death. With the meddling of another mother and daughter team, fortune turns Tess and Anna's irreconcilably different self-absorptions inside out (each wakes up in the other's body) to be made right again only by an act of selfless love on both parts.

The standard gags of traded places (hairstyle changes, fashion trips, and diction distinctions) are all trucked out and given their due here, but the script by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon adds a touch of spirit to the mix -- an actual feature of mothers and daughters growing up together: a recognition and respect by each not only for the other's talents and sensitivities, but also for the other's sexuality, her self (attractions come to be fully appreciated rather than judged, for example). "My Mother, My Self" shapeshifting naturally into "Our bodies, Ourselves," feminist in its self-appreciations.

The women's likenesses, their bonds, are brought into relief in the film by the bemused observation of the men (and boys) who remember them, who watch them, who meet them, without understanding. There is, of course, the overlaid joke, openly enjoyed in Mark Waters' direction, that the men's failure to get what's going on in the switched embodiments is, to the men, just part of the incomprehensibility that comes with loving women. But the film is also generous to them. Mark Harmon, as Tess's fiancé Ryan, is New Age without sliding into wimpiness, and Chad Murray, as Anna's love interest, Jake, is sexy when he rides his Harley, but sexier still when he shows himself ethical and emotional. Even little brother Harry (Ryan Malgarini) and grandpa (Harold Gould) are given substance on the periphery.

The performances are persuasive, too, even in their lightheartedness. Lohan does well at what is a harder task than it looks: adapting a persona that can hardly be imagined (I laughed out loud when seeing through her mother's eyes is made a literal experience -- and her arms are hardly long enough to hold the paper where she can see it), while Curtis shines in what seems a clear and perfect memory of a person she used to be, mocking her grown self through the eyes of her younger image. It is a delight to watch her give loving space to the resistant adolescent within, and a pleasure to watch it sparkle inside her even when the adult takes over again.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene