When it comes to Lifetime movies, most people don’t pay the slightest attention as to who made them. In the case of ‘Paris Can Wait’, a flat, sun-dappled divertissement about a married American woman who must fend off the advances of a flirty Frenchman as they make their way by convertible from the Côte d’Azur to Paris, the director’s identity actually matters, since this road movie is based on an actual trip taken by its creator, Eleanor Coppola, making her narrative feature debut at the sprightly age of 80.
As it happens, Eleanor Coppola, who happens to be the wife of ‘The Godfather’ director Francis Ford Coppola, is quite an accomplished artist and filmmaker in her own right. But the trouble with ‘Paris Can Wait’ is the way the movie seems so willing to let its leading lady be defined by her husband’s job.
Diane Lane plays Anne Lockwood, who, apart from being married to Michael (Alec Baldwin), a big-shot Hollywood producer permanently attached to his mobile phone, isn’t much of a character at all. In time, we learn a few key background details, but beyond these, she may as well be one more piece of baggage her husband drags along when he travels.
Suffocating in the sort of jazz music people try to talk over in restaurants, the film opens at the Cannes Film Festival, where Anne appears blasé in the face of all the pesky photographers, producers, and hangers-on vying for her husband’s attention — but also in the face of her incredible surroundings: the sea, the Riviera, the restaurants.
Maybe it’s a generational thing, but Anne’s predicament takes for granted a level of privilege that’s nothing short of nauseating. Here she is, tagging along on what is clearly a work trip, disgruntled about being bored in one of the most beautiful corners of the world. The couple’s plan had been to fly straight from Cannes to Budapest, where Michael has more business, before they can take a short vacation together in Paris, but Anne uses an earache as an excuse to go straight to the French capital.
Before she can buy her ticket for the five-hour train, however, her husband’s producing partner, Jacques Clement (Arnaud Viard), offers to drive her directly to Paris instead. Coppola has written Jacques with all the nuance of a Pepé le Pew cartoon, his every gesture feels like a leaden cliché. Jacques drives an old Peugeot convertible, which he steers off the road every hour for a cigarette break. He has a string of friends at nearly every stop along the way. But Anne is not won over by Jacques’ mannerisms, although there’s no denying that he possesses a certain charm.
Though nearly all the film’s laughs come at the expense of how Americans think the French behave, Anne is no great example herself. Her only hobby involves whipping out her digital camera and photographing whatever happens to be on her plate. And she’s no less a slave to her iPhone than her husband, answering the device without so much as an apology should it happen to ring in the middle of a three-star restaurant meal or relaxing picnic. Coppola allows one criticism: Anne is guilty of never slowing to smell the roses, and Jacques gives her the chance to do just that _ at one point filling the backseat with fresh-cut flowers.
More importantly, Jacques really sees her, managing to make her husband a bit jealous in the process. The 48 or so hours they spend together rekindle in this complacently married woman some idea of what she wants from her husband.n

Source: variety.com