Upon exiting the press screening for James Ivory's Le Divorce, a critic friend commented that the word which best described the film for him was "disjointed." The trouble is that I can't disagree. Though the ad campaigns make it out to be a frothy romp through contemporary Paris, the story of Le Divorce can't be said to belong to any fixed genre. It contains elements of said frothy romp, but also of melodrama and even suspense. It's a mish mash on some level, but I liked it, while my colleague didn't at all. The reasons behind that disagreement might be interesting to tease out.

It might be said that the disarray of Le Divorce is located primarily on the level of plot: it is here that various battling genres mix and they don't necessarily mix well. But it seems just as obvious to me that Ivory's attention isn't focused here. Like A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries--a superb film which ranks among his finest--Ivory's interest is in character and atmosphere. For all the complications offered by Le Divorce--divorces, trysts, affairs, attempted suicides, and murders--I remembered it first and foremost for its lovingly rendered cultural caricatures (the California sisters in Paris [Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts], their mom and dad [Stockard Channing and Sam Waterston], the French landlady, the expatriate American writer [Glenn Close], the British Christie's representative [Stephen Fry], the Hollywood super-agent [Matthew Modine], and so on); its elegant visual punctuation marks (Ivory often wipes from one shot to the next within a scene); and its warm evocation of believable familial interactions. Ivory is a master of the latter and, on the basis of Soldier's Daughter and Le Divorce, possesses a particular gift for portraying the experiences of American families overseas. Because Ivory is fundamentally, I think, a generous filmmaker, the film's perspective is weighted towards neither culture (American or French); each finds the surface peculiarities of the other amusing and so does Ivory. The word Jonathan Rosenbaum used in describing the film's outlook was "civilized" and that word seems to sum up Ivory's cinema for me.

Ivory's other metier is cataloging the cultural artifacts of a place. In Le Divorce, scenes grind to a halt as Ivory lingers on insert shots of elegantly prepared meals or the selection at a corner produce stand; early in the film, Ivory devotes an entire episode to the way scarves are worn in France. The pleasures of intelligently detailing character and locale, and relishing them for their idiosyncrasies, matter a lot more to Ivory than the forward-motion of drama. Inconsequential as these touches may be to the narrative, they add up to a precisely realized vision. And, as in almost every good film I know of, it's the narrative itself which ends up feeling a little inconsequential.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002