Le Divorce

A young woman (Kate Hudson) flies to Paris to visit her expatriate sister (Naomi Watts) just as the sister’s French husband walks out; she then becomes involved with her brother-in-law’s uncle and embroiled in a custody battle for a Renaissance painting. The script by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and director James Ivory (from Diane Johnson’s novel) has a sheen of cultured civility, with nice moments laced in here and there for the thoroughbred cast (Sam Waterston and Stockard Channing as Watts’ parents, Leslie Caron as her mother-in-law, and Bebe Neuwirth and Stephen Fry as art dealers after the painting), and Pierre Lhomme’s photography has the delectable glow of pastries in a boulangerie window. But Ivory’s stab at a Parisian Woody Allen movie is a fallen soufflé, a soap opera with an aura of snooty inertia.