Le Divorce (2003)

i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Two hours of painful nonsense in which every cliches about each country is expressed by someone of the other country. The only good cliche, perhaps too recent to be a cliche, is that Americans cannot commit crimes of passion; they only kill for money and drugs. Those who know the French know that they are far more materialistic than Americans, far more addicted to drugs so long as they are prescribed by doctors, who normally even prescribe medications for problems which yoghurt could solve more cheaply and more deliciously.Those who have read Balzac, Flaubert, Choderlos de la Clos, Diderot -- any French writer -- does not need this movie to reveal the sexual proclivities and temptations of the French. Nor do they need information about the French bourgeoisie whose glory came in 1789 and was pretty well gone within a year or two. All the vices of the pre-revolutionary aristocracy were as nothing compared to those of the 19th-century and 20th-century bourgeoisie. The Americans in this film are portrayed as naive and trusting while the French trust no one not in their own family -- a very wise policy perhaps but not one to make you enamored of them. I still like French food very much and hate the fact that the French make it. But then I recall that the French until the reign of Catherine de Medicis in the mid 16th century who brought cuisine and culture and coture were true barbarians and ate the same crap that the British ate: meat stewed in beer and other such delicacies. The French are very contemptuous not only of Americans but of their neighbors. A French tourist guide to Italy will tell you that the Lombards are good at this and the Neapolitans good at that -- as if Italy were Africa or some other godforsaken place. It is a pity we came to France's rescue in 1917. It's a crime that the French could not persevere against the Germans in 1940 when they had a much bigger army than the Germans and plenty of equipment. But they decided that it was better to hitch their wagon to the Third Reich than to fight. In WWI they fought bravely and successfully and didn't really need us; Woodrow Wilson was a fool to enter the war.

This is delightful from beginning to end. The casting is perfect - Naomi is lovely and the French cast are just right.The story covers the subtle culture differences regarding a divorce between an American woman and a French man and the morals and values (monetary and emotional). Not since 'Light in the Piazza' has there been such a perfect culture clash study.The ending is perfect everything works out for the best. It is sophisticated yet realistic. Very funny in unexpected ways.This is one to watch for the details - the fashion, cuisine, manners, location. Merchant Ivory is at its best here.

It is often that I read opinions in here. First as a cinema fan, then as a cinema professional. But these lines ("Little has prepared her for the consequences that go with it and the archaic laws about a couple's separation in that country, which benefits the husband while punishing the wife.") were more than over the top !!! Hos come you comment French laws ? Are you a lawyer specializing in French legal system ? OK, no stats here... but in about 90% of divorces men get "punished". They're deprived from they children's presence, have to pay a monthly pension, etc. etc. The tendency has changed for the last 15 years or so, but still men lose much more than they gain. So, please, stick to what you know... and stay away from what you pretend you know !!! And remember, fiction films are stories... NOT reality.

Le Divorce (2003) is not by any stretch a very good movie. But is it - as a stunning number of IMDb subscribers have dubbed it - "the worst movie ever made"? Very far from it I'd say, but then I've seen a ton of real clunkers in over five decades of obsessive movie viewing. While Le Divorce has more than its fair share of implausible and languorous moments, I nevertheless managed to stay reasonably awake and entertained throughout.The heavily negative response the film received from American reviewers and on this film site has perhaps less to do with the film's merits (or lack thereof) than with the misleading way it was marketed and to the casting of Kate Hudson in its lead role. Though limited in acting range, Ms. Hudson is blessed with her mother Goldie's winning smile and a screen-persona tailor-made for light comedy. In Le Divorce she seems to have stumbled into an alternate universe, and no doubt her many fans felt the same way upon viewing the film.However it might be classified (and I'm not sure how that might be), Le Divorce is clearly NOT a romantic comedy geared to the tastes of teens and twenty-somethings. It's probably better not to think of it as a romantic comedy at all - at least not in the usual American sense of a boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets girl plot with a heavy admixture of screwball humor to keep the patrons amused. Quite to the contrary, Le Divorce includes scenes of attempted suicide, stalking, hostage taking, and murder. And these are not handled with humor - screwball, black, or any other form. They are staged with at times all too much seriousness.Also, "the boy" in the romantic formula turns out to be a notorious 55 year old French sophisticate/philanderer named Edgar Cosset (Thierry Lhermitte) whose M.O. for the conduct of extra-marital affairs includes the gift of an expensive Hermes "Kelly bag" at the start of a relationship and a stylish scarf at its end. One of the running jokes in Le Divorce (admittedly not a belly-whopper) is that every woman in Paris seems to recognize Edgar's seduction methods and instruments except his latest flame, a visiting American ingénue, Isabel Walker (Hudson). Nor does the Edgar-Isabel plot have a happy ending in the manner of Gigi, a film referenced by Le Divorce through the casting of Leslie Caron in a well-done supporting role.There is no reconciliation to be found in Le Divorce between American post-feminist romantic idealism and French double-standard patriarchy and sexual cynicism. These are two worlds that do not comprehend each other, and never the twain shall meet- well, hardly ever. The film's other romantic plot involving Isabel's older sister, the pregnant poet Roxanne (Naomi Watts) does provide us with a somewhat conventional romantic resolution, by uniting Roxanne not with her divorce-seeking, two-timing French husband (who ends up precipitously and conveniently dead) but with the sympathetic lawyer she hires to represent her in an increasingly ugly property battle with her in-laws. By the time this happens, however, "le divorce" has been relegated to the background, and "l'affaire" between Isabel and Edgar has moved to central prominence in the screenplay.Naomi Watts is a great actress, but Le Divorce is clearly not her finest moment. Her role is by turns over-the-top dramatically (her poetry reading scene and subsequent suicide-attempt) and underwritten (she practically disappears in the last third of the film). The rest of Le Divorce's cast includes some very good actors like Glenn Close, Sam Waterston, Stockard Channing, Stephen Fry, Matthew Modine, and the aforementioned Leslie Caron. Other than Caron, the only one of these who is given much to do is Modine. And that turns out to be quite unfortunate since the mad betrayed-husband stalker/murderer he plays is a completely unmotivated and implausible character who bizarrely hijacks the film's final scenes for no apparent reason other than to make dramatic visual use of Le Tour Eiffel - after all, this is Paris, n'est pas? If Le Divorce had been a low-budget ex-Sundance project with a cast of no-names, I think it might have garnered a more appreciative following. It is nothing if not quirky, and it does offer some piquant cross-cultural humor and jabs at the privileged world of the arts(y). The plot also keeps us guessing where it will turn next, but one does have to wonder whether the director wasn't equally in the dark about that.