I rarely walk out of movies. Last one I walked on was the insipid 2014 “5 to 7” that had no relation to reality or surreality for that matter and clearly no relation to the pains of becoming a writer. But the film “Paris Can Wait” is now in the category of the walked out upon. I had a sense that was going to be the case after the first few scenes of dialogue in which my film-writing students would have shuddered. Scene after scene was laden with predictable, needless or inane dialogue. It’s clear from the outset the husband, Alec Baldwin, is a cad, cheats on his wife, and his dutiful wife, Diane Lane, is, well, dutiful. In an unsuspected plot twist (wink, wink, nod, nod) Lane can’t fly with Baldwin to Budapest then to Paris in a private jet because of a sudden ear infection. So, in comes Sir Lancelot, Baldwin’s film partner, Arnaud Viard, who agrees to drive Lane to Paris (spoiler alert…this is where the title comes in) and takes her in his dilapidated Peugeot which is constantly overheating and eventually breaks down. One has to question how a film producer who’s just been in Cannes hustling for whatever reason, drives a Peugeot that’s on its last wheels. From the time he picks Lane up he’s constantly lecturing about things French. Wine, cheese, Provence, Cezanne, blah, blah, blah every French cliché one can imagine as if Lane is an idiot. He “borrows” her credit card to use at the hotels they stay at under the pretext that he forgot his or that someone is illegally using his name since it’s a very popular name, whatever. Clearly, he’s a poseur, but the only thing worse than a poseur is a French poseur and Arnaud is at the top of the food chain in that category all the time trying to get into Lane’s panties. While having what one could only call a Paul Bocuse French dinner with Lane during their first hotel night, on her dime of course, one notices something very interesting. Anyone who knows anything about drinking red wine (in this case Châteauneuf-du-Pape) knows that one doesn’t hold the glass by the bottom of the bowl, but by the stem. The reason is simple: body heat. But Arnaud, poseur of Voltairean poseurs, does exactly that. One would think he’d try to enlighten Lane on the proper way to drink a glass of wine especially one that could cost $600 a bottle.
Not long into their “trip,” I got the sense Coppola was going to try to re-write Steve Coogan’s “The Trip” and its iterations the only difference being Coogan wasn’t getting hit on by Rob Brydon since there were other women for that. As the film wore on and as I began to predict the dialogue (which was the same time my teeth began to itch) the penultimate clinching scene for me is when the Peugeot finally breaks down on a seemingly never used road next to a river. They both have cell phones so they could easily call for help, but, no, that’s not in the script. For some reason, Arnaud had packed a picnic basket of food he apparently stole from the hotel (since he has no cash) with cheese and wine and whatever French food cliché one might expect and settles down on the riverbank to have a Manet-like "Dejeuner sur l'Herbe.” Unfortunately, for him, without a naked Diane Lane. Why would he have had a picnic basket already prepared? Was he waiting for his car to break down? If the car didn’t break down, wouldn’t the cheese go bad packed away in the trunk? Inquiring minds want to know.
The faux Manet lunch, over the problem of the poor Peugeot had to be dealt with. Curiously, our bon vivant Arnaud has no clue about what the problem is though he knows enough about the car to bring water for a constantly overheating radiator. So, Lane (apparently well-versed in auto mechanics) looks under the hood and, voilà, discovers the fan belt is broken. Now what? Well, Lane had seen a YouTube video in which a woman used her pantyhose temporarily to replace a fan belt and decides to do the same thing. That statement alone would answer so many questions about her marriage, but just how many hits might a YouTube video of a woman using her pantyhose to replace a fan belt get and what would be Lane’s reason for watching that? They cut the panty hose to the same length as the fan belt (he has a knife on his key chain) and, of course, it works (though one must ask what’s the melting point of nylon being used as a fan belt?), they drive to a gas station and hear the bad news. But the bad news, like all the French dialogue, comes without subtitles so if one knows some French a lot of what’s said (even as French cliché) is understood. If one doesn’t know French, then one is shit out of luck, but apparently Coppola didn’t think that was necessary for an American audience.
They need to leave the car to get repaired, rent a van of some sorts and drive to Lyon. Of course, if they’re on their way to Paris (244 miles from Lyon) in a rented van and his car is somewhere between Cannes and Lyon (186 miles) the question becomes how to retrieve his car? But who needs facts in a fairytale romance like this. Before going to yet another hotel for which Arnaud won’t pay, they stop at the Institut Lumière for an undisclosed reason. Arnaud says he has some business to talk over with some woman who works there and leaves Lane in the capable hands of a tour guide who will show her all the neat things associated with the films of Lumière. That was it for me. I could have walked from Cannes to Paris in that amount of time and among the French clichés, the insipid dialogue and the painfully needless scenes (Eleanor Coppola is not Francis) I had had enough. Walked out.
Baldwin was only there for the cameos and Lane must have done it for the cash since she’s a better actor than that. The blurb to the film goes something like this: “What should be a seven-hour drive turns into a carefree two-day adventure replete with diversions involving picturesque sights, fine food and wine, humor, wisdom and romance, reawakening Anne's senses and giving her a new lust for life.” Really? She’s made out to be a functional illiterate who’s constantly being duped by a French poseur who doesn’t know how hold a wine glass properly. The fact Eleanor Coppola wrote and directed the piece recalled something I once heard Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer say when someone asked him how he liked the Streisand adaptation of his short story “Yentl.” Always the gentleman, Singer replied, “Sometimes I think it’s better if one person doesn’t try to do everything in a film.” Amen.