Paris Can Wait

At the age of 81, Eleanor Coppola makes her narrative feature directing debut with the lightweight Paris Can Wait, starring Diane Lane as a 50-something woman unhappily married to a film producer (Alec Baldwin). While her husband jets from Cannes to Budapest, Lane’s Anne accepts a ride to Paris from one of his associates, a cuisine-obsessed Frenchman named Jacques (played with a conspicuous absence of charm by Arnaud Viard). Instead of driving straight to Paris, Jacques takes Anne on a Manic Pixie Dream Pierre food-and-wine tour of the French countryside, constantly diverting from the main road to walk among ruins, visit cheese shops, dawdle in museums and hold impromptu picnics; meanwhile, Anne gently contemplates her place in the world. There’s very little imagination on hand, so naturally Jacques is the sort of walking cliché who drools lines like “We French have a different idea of marriage than you Americans.” D.B.