From James Ivory (by way of a Diane Johnson novel), a light, witty, civilized divertissement about Americans abroad, living the high life and the heady life in present-day Paris. A lot has changed since Henry James and Edith Wharton were writing about this sort of thing: sooner to bed and quicker on the trigger. But a lot hasn't: old world and old money in opposition to the interloper and the upstart. Ivory's immediately preceding film was an adaptation of James's The Golden Bowl, and the continuity is plain to see. The characters here -- even more than there -- are numerous (the cast listed alphabetically instead of hierarchically), the storylines loosely tangled, and the cultural observations random and wide-ranging. The primary focus is on a pair of So-Cal sisters with a heap of blond hair between them, one of whom (Naomi Watts) is a struggling poet going through a marital split, in mid-pregnancy, from an artistic French aristocrat, while the other (Kate Hudson, whose flashes of resemblance to her real-life mother, Goldie Hawn, can be a handicap) occupies herself, first, as the mistress of a middle-aged right-wing mouthpiece (Thierry Lhermitte) who happens to be the uncle of her errant brother-in-law, and second, as the amanuensis of a literary expatriate (Glenn Close, in a Lady Macbeth wig) who long ago had a fling herself with the right-winger. And the most engaging, if not the primary, plot thread has to do with the legal wrangling of the divided couple over ownership of a painting of Saint Ursula which may or may not be a genuine La Tour: Christie's says yes, the Louvre says no, the Getty is not of one mind. There is plenty of fun-poking in all directions, but with a gentility and an urbanity that bring to mind such transatlantic Hollywood immigrants as Lubitsch, Mamoulian, and (sometimes) Wilder. And the revelling in physical beauty, expensive clothes, buoyant colors, etc., maintains a balance of taste and vulgarity, elegance and exhibitionism, that recalls a time when Edith Head ruled the costume departments at Paramount and then Universal. The glamour days. With Sam Waterston, Stockard Channing, Matthew Modine, Leslie Caron. (2003) — Duncan Shepherd
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